Smart Home Appliance Secrets
Roomba maps houses -- both the dimensions of spaces and rooms between furniture and other items would be valuable to some of the significant players fighting to control the intelligent home. However, iRobot "has not had any conversations with other companies about selling data," said Colin Angle, the firm's CEO. The Dangers of Cloud Storage Data accumulated by clever appliances "is not safe if it's sent off to the cloud," said Michael Patterson, CEO of both Plixer. It signifies a threat to national safety and the ethics of associations, Scott cautioned. Reaping the Rewards Amazon's Echo along with Google's Home voice-activated speakers monitor and gather information about users via various home appliances and other products, as do makers of TVs. Consumers that wish to maintain their information secure shouldn't invest in appliances that are Internet-capable, Patterson cautioned. "No IoT device is safe from a data compromise." Add artificial intelligence, large data calculations and machine learning into the mix, and the bad guys can launch "massive hyperfocused campaigns against specific high-value sensitive targets," he pointed out. "Adversaries can craft personalized social engineering lures related to targets' exploring patterns, interests, livelihood and vices, as an instance, and therefore skip the cybersecurity and cyber-hygiene reflexes that normally thwart 86 percent of societal engineering programs." However, from conversations with device manufacturers and cybersecurity specialists, "data collected by smart home devices will not be available to just any third party," IHS Markit's Kozak told TechNewsWorld. Data collection is commonplace, Kozak pointed out. Reward cards, gym smartphones collect user data and trackers. "iRobot is committed to the security of our customers' information, which we consider very seriously," he said. "We build security directly into the product creation process from the start, at the time of ideation." Both the Roomba robots and iRobot's network architecture "are continually reviewed by several third party safety agencies," Angle pointed out. Everyone can gather an unbelievable quantity of information on anybody else, just by minding search engines on the Web. Insert in data gathered other gadgets and by home appliances, and data on customers' electricity consumption patterns gathered by smart meters, and it's possible to get a very granular picture of what's going on in someone's home. Also, producers of smart apparatus who collect information "don't act on the data, and even more suggest they ... aggregate it," he mentioned. This trend could lead to serious threats to consumers' privacy and safety. Baby monitors have been obtained by hackers, for instance. Further, the United States National Security Agency has made no bones about its openness to tap on the data made available from smart appliances and the Internet of Things. "iRobot will never sell customer data," he told TechNewsWorld. IRobot addresses consumer IoT "with the fundamental principles of security: secure data at rest, secure data in transit, secure execution, and secure updates," he explained. Smart home appliances and gadgets store the data they gather in the cloud, which is not inviolate. The Swedish government recently faced an upheaval following the discovery that all Swedish citizens' data were leaked after it was transferred to a cloud operate by IBM, a company known for powerful cybersecurity. The authorities replaced two of its own ministers in a bid to quell the uproar that was subsequent. The recent rumor which iRobot had engaged in talks with Apple, Amazon and Google parent Alphabet to market the information its Roomba vacuum cleaner gathers caused privacy issues. "The ease with which an attacker can harvest and collect demographic and psychographic data on targets is astounding," said James Scott, senior fellow in the Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology. Malware preventative technologies from security providers "are not a surefire defense against targeted attacks," he told TechNewsWorld. "Nothing short of unplugging from the Internet can keep your data safe." Data collection is meant to give an extra revenue stream for the maker or service provider, as well as improve the consumer's expertise, said Blake Kozak, chief analyst at IHS Markit. That is the rumor which iRobot was discussing sale of the data to a third party website [click here for more] alarmed consumer privacy advocates. "The company will never violate customer trust by selling or misusing customer-related data, including data collected by our connected products," Angle emphasized.
