Search
Content type: Report
When you rent a car at the airport, use a car-share for a family day trip, one of the first things you are likely to do before setting off on your journey, is to connect your phone to the car. You switch on the Bluetooth and see a list of other people’s phones that were previously connected - Mike’s iPhone, Samsung Galaxy, Bikerboy_Troi, Dee Dee. You input your journey into the navigation, perhaps noticing stored locations of previous drivers.
Seems fairly innocuous? Wrong. Your name and…
Content type: Examples
For a period between the end of October and November 3 2016 the heating and hot water systems in two buildings in the city of Lappeenranta, Finland were knocked out by a distributed denial of service attack designed to make the systems fail. The systems responded by repeatedly rebooting the main control circuit, which meant that the heating was never working - at a time when temperatures had already dropped below freezing. Specialists in building maintenance noted that companies often skimp on…
Content type: Examples
In 2017, when user Robert Martin posted a frustrated, disparaging review of the remote garage door opening kit Garadget on Amazon, the peeved owner briefly locked him out of the company's server and told him to send the kit back. After complaints on social media and from the company's board members, CEO Denis Grisak reinstated Martin's service. The incident highlighted the capricious and fine-grained control Internet of Things manufacturers can apply and the power they retain over devices…
Content type: Examples
Connecticut police have used the data collected by a murder victim's Fitbit to question her husband's alibi. Richard Dabate, accused of killing his wife in 2015, claimed a masked assailant came into the couple's home and used pressure points to subdue him before shooting his wife, Connie. However, her Fitbit's data acts as a "digital footprint", showing she continued to move around for more than an hour after the shooting took place. A 2015 report from the National Institute of…
Content type: Examples
A 2017 lawsuit filed by Chicagoan Kyle Zak against Bose Corp alleges that the company uses the Bose Connect app associated with its high-end Q35 wireless headphones to spy on its customers, tracking the music, podcasts, and other audio they listen to and then violates their privacy rights by selling the information without permission. The case reflects many of the concerns associated with Internet of Things devices, which frequently arrive with shoddy security or dubious data…
Content type: News & Analysis
For as long as automobiles have been around, manufacturers have been trying to find ways of putting more technology inside of cars, oftentimes sold as value-added services for their customers, whether that be 8-tracks of the 1960s and 1970s, the enhancement to security of central locking of the 1980s and 1990s, or the introduction of satellite navigation in the 2000s.
Today, as our technologies become ‘smarter’, so do the risks to our personal privacy. This especially true as society is on the…