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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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[–] 11 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Keeping it offline some of the time isn't effective against passive data collection unless you're willing to take the inconvenient step of factory-resetting it each time you're about to use it. Anything it collects it can just hold onto until it next gets the chance to upload.

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  • [–] 8 points 11 months ago (1 child)

    SmartTVs will hold onto your data as long as they have storage, even through a factory reset. So if you sell it and the next person hooks it up to the Internet then the data is uploaded.

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