Data gone wild
While in theory no data stored should ever link personal information with actions, you’re forced to trust that a company collecting that data will look after it in the right way.
Smart home manufacturers couldn’t produce the products they do without that data, whether it’s metrics about product use, voice recordings that help to refine the abilities of smart assistants, or captured info sent to the cloud for processing. Many of us don’t care. Handing of that data, in theory stored securely and used to make our experience better, is the accepted price of a connected home.
But a dive into Amazon-owned camera-maker Ring’s terms of service, to give an example, is sobering. “You give Ring the right, without any compensation or obligation to you, to access and use your content…” Want to get rid of it? Good luck: “Deleted content and user recordings may be stored by Ring in order to comply with certain legal obligations.” Qualifying that this data will only be made available if ordered by a court.
Ring’s recent public issues, along those suffered by users of Google’s Nest devices, seem to stem from poorly secured user accounts. We, at the end of the chain, are equally responsible for locking down our data; keeping up with security patches, using strong unique passwords, and taking advantage of two-factor authentication. It won’t stop breaches like that suffered by Orvibo in 2019, in which some 2 billion records including user IDs, email addresses and hashed passwords were leaked from the company’s database, but it’ll lessen the impact at least.