EFF: “…The last two decades have seen the internet move from living-room and office terminals to our phones, watches, appliances and lighting fixtures. And although so-called smart devices and the Internet of Things (IoT) have allowed us to automate some aspects of our lives, they’ve also been plagued with privacy and security problems, giving hackers and data miners unprecedented access to our personal and behavioral information. Examples of large botnets such as the well-known Mirai and more recent Fronton—which consist of Internet-connected IoT devices—have caused significant damage, and have given IoT a terrible reputation when it comes to security. Governments have started to take note, and the passage of the IoT Cybersecurity Improvement Act of 2020 in the US, while welcome, has only begun to tackle this issue. On the privacy front, our connected devices and appliances are delivering potentially hundreds of discrete data points per day to companies without any meaningful limits on or insight into what they are doing with this data. And homeowners who wish to add smart devices to their homes are often directed to install apps which control these devices, but also deliver data to third parties without notification. Mozilla provides a useful tool, *privacy not included, to search your own smart devices for what they may be sending to the cloud. If, for instance, you own a Furbo Dog Camera with Dog Nanny, you are subject to a privacy policy which states Furbo can “collect any audio, video or pictures you create, upload, save or share” and “collect video and audit information of individuals when they pass in front of the camera or speak when the Furbo Dog Camera is on.” Unfortunately, this policy is not atypical.

Researchers at Northeastern University and Imperial College London found in a survey of IoT devices across the industry that 72 of the 81 they looked at were sending information to third parties…”