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.

The fact that this isn’t considered outright fraud is disturbing. This person OWNS the device, yes? They’re not leasing it. FFS, this should be illegal.

I agree with you that this should be illegal. I expect this was in the terms of service, though. Since we have no laws restricting this kind of bullshit, the company can argue that they’re within their rights. We need some real legislation around privacy. It’s never going to happen, but it needs to. We need a right to anonymity but that is too scary for advertisers and our police state.