Security fears about what we are actually agreeing to in the fine print of smart devices & online apps
Imagine having to pledge your loyalty to the Chinese state just to use your bathroom mirror or a lightbulb.
There is a chance you already have and just don’t know it
Security Fears round smart devices are real. A 2018 report for the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission said Beijing was funding a lot of research into IoT security vulnerabilities. To protect itself, but also for exploitation.
Hidden in the terms and conditions of a range of smart devices, everyday devices that can be controlled remotely via the internet, are a number of odd conditions.
Among them is that you promise not to use the device in any act that includes “opposing the basic principles determined in the Constitution”.
Another condition you unwittingly agree to when you install the online app that runs the smart device, is that you won’t use it to engage in “destroying religious policy of the state and advocating heresy and feudalistic superstition”.
A total of nine (occasionally 10) conditions – virtual word-for-word copies of each other – are written into the User Agreement or Information Content Standard of companies selling “Internet of Things” (IoT) devices.
This is a huge growth market, with 12 billion IoT connections worldwide and counting as of 2020.
It’s a market China currently dominates
RNZ first found the conditions amid the fine print for an app from an Australian company, Mirabella, after a local consumer came across them.
Mirabella was the only firm to respond to RNZ’s queries – to say it had changed the conditions. The app and its appliances and devices were only meant to be used in accordance with laws in the country where they were being used.
The local consumer who raised the alarm, said: “There’s some weird stuff in there”, adding they were worried if it meant China was penetrating people’s routers or phones.
The terms have legal power
Years ago, privacy campaigners tried to get Americans to care, with the Electronic Frontier Foundation warning the agreements “are efforts to bind consumers legally to a number of strict terms. Yet you never sign your name”.
The new pledges of fealty, in order to run a smart lightbulb or heatpump, appear to have serious origins.
Just recently, the head of the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre warned the tech was becoming “an attractive target for a range of threat actors . The threat posed by nation states is particularly acute”.
Lobbyists and others have been using these fears as a rallying cry for the US and other Western countries to do much more to lead the way in setting international tech standards, where China has been leaving them for dead.
China’s unrivaled hold on the IoT market is the subject of serious research and speculation about how it is also uniquely placed to disrupt it. Not just your kitchen mixer, but the hefty side of IoT which encompasses water, transport, waste, CCTV, traffic lights and emergency services.
Original blog taken from an RNZ article in 2022. Should definitely still be on our radars today as we use the Cloud in nearly every aspect of our daily use of smart devices and apps.
Check out these earlier blogs for more info on IoT and the security risks that could affect your everyday life.
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