Quote:
Originally Posted by JasonCSU
You might think that, but data is valuable. Mined data on your electrical and fuel usage may be sold to companies looking to target sales of new HVAC systems, solar panels, or energy efficient windows to potential customers. Sure, that may seem harmless, but what about the data collected from thermostat models that can track if someone is in the home? Do you really want data being collected on when or not you are home, then being analyzed and possibly sold to other companies?
Not to get too off topic, but think about the many fitness monitors people are wearing these days. Some of those are cloud based, and just think of how valuable health data on individuals would be to the right client. "Why did my health insurance just go up?"  |
Exactly. Even beyond that. With Google being the predominant search engine, imagine you searching on something and having your search results skewed based on data collected about you through their various devices that can be influenced by back door deals with companies willing to pay to have their sites be first on the search list.
Beyond this, has anyone thought what else these devices are doing on your network? I doubt anyone has spent anytime throwing on a packet sniffer to see what is happening on their network with these devices. I have had this very situation happen to me. DirecTV to be exact. What triggered my indepth investigation was a network printer I was using on my home network. Xerox Phaser 8560MFP/D to be exact. These printers use solid stick ink to print and every time the printer wakes up from sleep mode ink is wasted as the heater elements fire up to precondition the ink sticks for printing. These ink sticks are not cheap. So imagine my irritation when this printer was being woken up from sleep mode every 15 minutes. No one was sending print jobs or accessing the printer during these times. I threw a packet sniffer on and capture some data. To my surprise, the offending IP was a DirecTV DVR hitting my printer. And reading through the packet payload, I was seeing multiple HTTP GET queries pulling stats off of my printer about the web server version and such. So the big questions are why is a DirecTV DVR probing my network and why is it collecting data on specific devices? Since finding out this revelation, all of my DirecTV DVRs have been isolated/walled off from the rest of my network via VLAN and firewall segregation.
And then there's that hacker element. If you think your data is safe, you have something coming to you. Imagine some hack that grabs all this data and gets sold to the criminal underworld. Not only will they most likely have some geolocation of where your home is, they'll have a large historical data set of when people are most likely home, and a good guess as to whether your home is worth "investigating" based on power consumption usage.