{"id":9492,"date":"2020-01-09T11:00:15","date_gmt":"2020-01-09T17:00:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bestofswla.com\/?p=9492"},"modified":"2020-01-09T10:57:25","modified_gmt":"2020-01-09T16:57:25","slug":"i-spy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bestofswla.com\/2020\/01\/09\/i-spy\/","title":{"rendered":"I Spy"},"content":{"rendered":"

Is your TV spying on you? Maybe.<\/strong><\/p>\n

By Kristian Bland<\/em><\/p>\n

The \u201cinternet of things\u201d has been growing rapidly over the past few years, with \u201csmart\u201d functionality being added to everything from televisions to refrigerators, toasters to doorbells, and everything in between. Such devices can offer great benefits, such as unlocking your home for a guest when you\u2019re away or recording someone stealing a package from your doorstep. Other smart devices? Well, not so much.<\/p>\n

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In a rush to connect everything possible to the internet, manufacturers have come up with some pretty bizarre products. Take the Quirky Egg Minder, for instance. If you\u2019ve ever been frustrated because you weren\u2019t able to connect a tray of eggs to the internet so your smartphone could receive an alert when you were running low, this is the product for you. Most people rely on their own two eyes to see how many eggs they have left whenever they remove one. But they\u2019re just cavemen afraid of entering the technological wonderland of the modern age. Right?<\/p>\n

There are also water bottles that will alert your phone to remind you to take a sip \u2014 you know, just in case the most basic biological functions of your own body fail to let you know when you\u2019re thirsty. While you\u2019re worrying about your body, maybe you can pick up a smart toothbrush to use after you\u2019ve eaten a meal with your smart fork that vibrates when you\u2019re eating too fast.<\/p>\n

The internet is a weird place.<\/p>\n

While most of these things are a little silly and mostly harmless, anything connected to the internet is vulnerable to being hacked. Everything connected is. It\u2019s just the way things are, and you should be aware of the risks whenever you open up a new digital door to your home.<\/p>\n

Smart TVs can do everything from report your viewing habits to marketing teams to monitoring everything you say and do in front of them. The last option usually comes in the form of a hacker gaining access to a vulnerable device. But everyone has had the experience of mentioning a product in conversation and then being shown an endless stream of advertisements for it the next day.<\/p>\n

Does this mean your devices are secretly recording everything you say so they can try to sell you whatever you were just talking about? Probably not, but they could. The functionality is there.<\/p>\n

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 <\/p>\n

However, what\u2019s usually happening in these cases has to do with something called \u201cpredictive analytics.\u201d Everything you do online is tracked and stored and mined and analyzed. Then all that data gets packaged up and served to a machine-learning algorithm that uses it to predict what you\u2019re interested in \u2014 often before you\u2019re even aware of it yourself. So, when you see an ad for that thing you were just talking about yesterday, it\u2019s probably not because your phone was listening; it\u2019s just because some predictive analytics algorithm out there was able to guess what you\u2019re thinking about with stunning accuracy.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s probably wrong a lot of the time, though. It\u2019s only when it\u2019s right that we take notice because it seems like too much a coincidence.<\/p>\n

All that being said, there are risks to bringing a smart device into your home. Once inside your network, a hacker can spread from your TV to other smart devices and the next thing you know, some creep in Finland is watching your baby sleep while whispering scary things through the monitor.<\/p>\n

There are ways to protect yourself. The first thing everyone should do with a new smart device is also the thing most people never do with a new smart device: change the login credentials. Change the default passwords or you\u2019re basically leaving your front door wide open and inviting everyone in the world into your home.<\/p>\n

After that, make sure you regularly check for and install any updates from the manufacturer. These updates usually contain patches that plug various holes in the device\u2019s security. So keeping everything current is a great way to make sure any recently discovered vulnerabilities have been taken care of.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s also important to keep in mind that you might be agreeing to be spied upon simply by using a smart device. As part of the data-mining motivation that\u2019s behind most apps and smart devices, it\u2019s important that companies are able to monitor what you do with their devices and software. To that end, they often bury specific terminology in their terms of service that allow them to keep tabs on what you\u2019re doing. Data is the biggest, most lucrative commodity in the world today, and many devices and apps only exist to gather as much of it as they can \u2014 both legally when you agree to it and illegally when you don\u2019t.<\/p>\n

Any voice-activated devices, including Amazon\u2019s Alexa and Apple\u2019s Siri, have to keep their microphones on and listening at all times or they won\u2019t be able to wake up when you shout at them from across the room to stop playing that alarm you forgot to turn off. Anything with an open microphone has the potential to record everything it hears, and both Amazon and Apple have faced lawsuits alleging they unlawfully store and monitor those recordings. The same thing applies to everything with voice controls and microphones, including televisions.<\/p>\n

So, is your TV actually spying on you? Probably.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Is your TV spying on you? Maybe. By Kristian Bland The \u201cinternet of things\u201d has been growing rapidly over the past few years, with \u201csmart\u201d functionality being added to everything from televisions to refrigerators, toasters to doorbells, and everything in between. Such devices can offer great benefits, such as unlocking your home for a guest [&hellip<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":44,"featured_media":9493,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[4,1173],"yoast_head":"\nI Spy - BestOfSwla<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/bestofswla.com\/2020\/01\/09\/i-spy\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"I Spy - BestOfSwla\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Is your TV spying on you? Maybe. 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