Your smart doorbell may be collecting more data than you think, study finds

Your smart doorbell may be collecting more data than you think, study finds

The study tested 81 IoT devices to analyze their behavior and tracking habits, and in some cases brought rather surprising findings



Have you stopped to think what kind of data may be collected by an innocuously-looking smart device, where the information is sent, and whether it is encrypted? Researchers at Northeastern University and Imperial College London have looked into this very issue and conducted a range of experiments in controlled environments in both the United States and the United Kingdom.


Their paper shows that the researchers took an interesting approach by configuring their US lab to look like a studio apartment with all the IoT devices integrated. The “studio lab” was used by 36 participants over six months, who interacted with the devices in a way that would be common in day-to-day use. These experiments were uncontrolled and consisted of capturing all the unlabeled traffic generated by the devices. The full results of the experiments are outlined in the full paper, called Information Exposure From Consumer IoT Devices.


For example, two of the tested smart doorbells were shown to perform rather unexpected tasks. The integrated camera on one of the doorbells uploaded a snapshot after its first activation and every time someone moved in front of it – a feature that was not disclosed anywhere. Curiously, there was no way to access these snapshots, which begs the question: where were these snapshots being uploaded and why wasn’t there a way to access them?


The other doorbell, meanwhile, recorded a video every time a user moved in front of it, and the companion app that is used to set up the device failed to disclose that a real-time recording was being captured ..

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