Anyway this is your reminder to STOP BUYING SMART DEVICES THAT AREN’T NECESSARY.
Your soap does not need to connect to the internet. Your fridge does not need to be able to track the temperature in other countries. Your stove shouldn’t talk to you
This is not “technology bad” this is “these corporations are tracking you and your movements at ALL TIMES OF THE DAY.” They know your every move down to when you wash your hands after you take a shit. Alexa and Siri were the first introduction to this, and once people got used to them on their phones, they put them in their own little gadgets for your house.
And then they connected those gadgets to the lights. To the doors. To the window locks. To the thermostat.
You should be TERRIFIED at how many things are becoming “smart” these days. It’s yet another way for companies to sell to you, and, in a worst case scenario, it can be the thing that puts you in harms way.
Imagine you’re running a little late on your electric bill, and your fridge is a “smart” fridge. And because you’re running late on your payment they just….lock your fridge. Not shut the electricity off. Lock your fridge. Because fridges can now be locked remotely. You can no longer access your food until you pay them.
Cops want to know if you’ve been to any protests recently? They can track that handy dandy smart watch you decided to wear, even though you left your phone in the car. They can tell if you were home all day or lying.
Abusive partner or family member? They can shut off your support systems everywhere. Decide when you get to eat, if you do. Decide how hot or cold the house should be to make you suffer. Turn off the oven in the middle of you cooking dinner bc you upset them. Lock you in. Lock you out.
Your appliances, your LIFE, should not be surrounded by smart tech. Buy normal clocks. Get normal soap dispensers. Keep a pen and paper on the fridge to write down your grocery list. Set a manual timer for the oven. Wear a normal watch that only tells time. Get a step counter that clips to your belt.
Phone, laptop, TV. Those are the only things that make sense being “smart.” Everything else is one step closer to a dystopian novel that you don’t want to be in.
Your phone already tracks your every step. Don’t give every other thing in your life that ability.
And here’s the thing! It’s not only something that can cause you problems if you’re late to pay bills or have abusive partners/family or are doing something the government may not take kindly to!
Let’s say, hypothetically, you do literally nothing. Well, turns out there’s a bug in the fridge software that sets the temperature to 60 degrees when it receives some unexpected input from your fridge app. Or the manufacturer pushes out an involuntary fridge update and now, while the update is downloading, sorry! your the fridge doesn’t open until the update is done.
And these are only the issues that affect you. Generally, Smart Device manufacturers do not think for even one second about the security of their devices. So, this means that hackers will see well known and publicized security holes that have been easily available for literal years but the manufacturer is simply too lazy to fix, use those holes to get into devices, and use those devices as bots to attack whoever they please (and, as a bonus, it look like it’s coming from your home!)
You’d think that this sounds like something out of a horror movie but this is the reality we live in RIGHT NOW. Many of the largest botnets (e.g. the Mirai botnet) in the world consist largely of compromised smart/IoT (internet of things) devices.
So uh just give it some thought before you buy the SmartChair3000 – it’s probably not as cool as it sounds :P
