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Manufacturer issues remote kill command to disable smart vacuum after engineer blocks it from collecting data — user revives it with custom hardware and Python scripts to run offline (www.tomshardware.com)
submitted 11 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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An engineer got curious about how his iLife A11 smart vacuum worked and monitored the network traffic coming from the device. That’s when he noticed it was constantly sending logs and telemetry data to the manufacturer — something he hadn't consented to. The user, Harishankar, decided to block the telemetry servers' IP addresses on his network, while keeping the firmware and OTA servers open. While his smart gadget worked for a while, it just refused to turn on soon after. After a lengthy investigation, he discovered that a remote kill command had been issued to his device.

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[–] 198 points 11 months ago (12 children)

The fact that this isn't considered outright fraud is disturbing. This person OWNS the device, yes? They're not leasing it.

FFS, this should be illegal.

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  • [–] 55 points 11 months ago (5 children)

    I agree with you that this should be illegal. I expect this was in the terms of service, though. Since we have no laws restricting this kind of bullshit, the company can argue that they're within their rights.

    We need some real legislation around privacy. It's never going to happen, but it needs to. We need a right to anonymity but that is too scary for advertisers and our police state.

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  • [–] 6 points 11 months ago

    I expect this was in the terms of service, though

    While I expect the same, there's also just a reasonablility standard. If Meta and Google updated their TOS to say that users agreed to become human chattle slaves to mine cobalt and forfeit their rights, no court (...right, SCOTUS?...right?) would uphold that. A TOS is a contract, but it's mostly for the protection of companies from liability. Takign active steps to brick someone's device over the device not connecting to it's C2 server (the company had zero evidence this was done intentionally and a router firewall misconfiguration could just have easily done the same thing), is IMO something that should result in a lawsuit.

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  • [–] 15 points 11 months ago (3 children)

    There needs to be a huge neon orange warning on the Front of these products that explains, clearly, that you don't own it, your privacy will be invaded and the company can disable it at anytime. This will stop people from buying this garbage, and hopefully companies will stop if they want our money.

    My life rule is, if it says Smart on it, it's never going to be smart. It will always cause trouble.

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