Man Alarmed to Discover His Smart Vacuum Was Broadcasting a Secret Map of His House
Man Alarmed to Discover His Smart Vacuum Was Broadcasting a Secret Map of His House
Since I dont see it mentioned, the company is
Just so we are clear. You should all up your name and shame game.
o7 thank you for your service
All modern robot vacuums do this. Amazon and Zillow actually buy that data too.
Implying the vast majority of roombas aren't doing this
There's no safe "opt-out" for people who cannae be arsed to vacuum lol
Oh crap. I had one. It committed suicide off the stairs
Maybe for the best.
iLife A11 smart vacuum
In addition, Narayanan says he uncovered a suspicious line of code broadcasted from the company to the vacuum, timestamped to the exact moment it stopped working. “Someone — or something — had remotely issued a kill command,” he wrote.
“I reversed the script change and rebooted the device,” he wrote. “It came back to life instantly. They hadn’t merely incorporated a remote control feature. They had used it to permanently disable my device.”
In short, he said, the company that made the device had “the power to remotely disable devices, and used it against me for blocking their data collection… Whether it was intentional punishment or automated enforcement of ‘compliance,’ the result was the same: a consumer device had turned on its owner.”
They kill switched it remotely. Yikes.
All IoT devices do this to keep you from blocking their data collection. They won’t work reliably without a regular ping home. They lock up if they can’t phone home frequently enough.
Tapo's sockets don't - in fact they explicitly have a 'local only' function. All you lose is control outside your home network.
Tuya on the other hand will start leeching off the fucking Bluetooth of your pairing device if you hobble them.
Haven't had one yet. Block all IOT devices from internet all work fine.
More likely it killed itself after not being in contact with home base. Since it worked fine elsewhere
Well, yes, that's what those cheap "smart" devices do. Or does anyone think cheap smart would fit into that device? Rule of thumb: if a device needs internet access, it is spying on you.
!homeassistant@lemmy.world on a isolated vLAN is my goal for "Smart" devices.
Yeah, I read about iRobot gathering and selling info about apartments like 10 years ago. People still alarmed by this are simply ignorant.
Ignorant of what?
Ignorant of how smart vacuums work and how all connected devices are used to gather personal information that can be sold for profit.
I know very well why I installed valetudo before I even started my new vac for the first time 😁
I received a Tikom vacuum as a gift and was so sad to see I couldn't installed Valetudo.
On the plus side, it works with no connection and so it's only slightly less covenient to just...press the button on the vacuum itself when I take my dog for a walk. Gotta dump the tray from last time anyway
This is the way. It works great, I've been running it for years.
At this point, if you buy a smart thing you have to know it's spyware.
True asf
“Someone — or something — had remotely issued a kill command,” he wrote.
“I reversed the script change and rebooted the device,” he wrote. “It came back to life instantly. They hadn’t merely incorporated a remote control feature. They had used it to permanently disable my device.”
In short, he said, the company that made the device had “the power to remotely disable devices, and used it against me for blocking their data collection… Whether it was intentional punishment or automated enforcement of ‘compliance,’ the result was the same: a consumer device had turned on its owner.”
Treasonous malware.
If he blocked the data collection how did it get the kill command?
Outgoing vs Incoming
This article just screams rage-bait. Not that I am against making people aware of this kind of privacy invasion, but the authors did not bother to do any fact checking.
Firstly, they mention that the vacuum was "transmitting logs and telemetry that [the guy] had never consented to share". If you set up an app with the robot vacuum company, I'm pretty sure you'll get a rather long terms and services document that you just skip past, because who bothers reading that?
Secondly, the ADB part is rather weird. The person probably tried to install Valetudo on it? Otherwise, I have no clue what they tried to say with "reprinting the devices’ circuit boards". I doubt that this guy was able to reverse engineer an entire circuit board, but was surprised when seeing that ADB is enabled? This is what makes some devices rather straight forward to install custom firmware that block all the cloud shenanigans, so I'm not sure why they're painting this as a horrifying thing. Of course, you're broadcasting your map data to the manufacturer so that you can use their shitty app.
The part saying that it had full root access and a kill-switch is a bit worse, but still... It doesn't have to be like this. Shout-out to the people working on the Valetudo project. If you're interested in getting a privacy-friendly robot vacuum, have a look at their website. It requires some know-how, but once it's done, you know for sure you don't need to worry about a 3rd party spying on you.
I am assuming the individual described in the article is based in the US, but nevertheless, many countries do not allow spying, fraud and criminality as long as you have a TOS that says you are allowed to do so.
This is a very provincial manner of thinking and shows how deeply tolerance of corruption and criminality dominates the American mind.
Same with the kill switch, it is essentially a fraudulent scheme, a criminal activity.
Americans are conditioned to do a lot of things without thinking about it, but if they ever really stopped to consider it, they'd be outraged.
For instance, those heart-tugging ads for St Jude's Children's Hospital. It's a great thing they do, taking in cancer kids, and covering all the expenses, even housing and food. They show grateful parents crying, because their kids have a chance because of the charity of St Jude and the viewers, and viewers shed a tear and donate.
It never occurs to anyone that in almost every other country in the world, such a place wouldn't be necessary. Their cancer kids would simply be taken care of. No pomp about it, no commercials begging for donations, curing cancer kids is just business as usual.
But in America, your kid will just DIE unless you've got good health insurance (which is about to get a LOT more expensive), a lot of money, or hit the charity lottery.
But that never occurs to Americans watching that ad. They will dig into their pockets to send money to St Jude, before they will give money to a progressive candidate to change our health care system so it doesn't require tear-jerking marketing to operate.
Just checked out Valetudo. Gotta love the FOSS community. Can I ask if you've used it? If so, which vacuum did you set it up on?
I have a friend who set up a Dreame L10s Ultra. I helped them solder the breakout board, and was there when they flashed the new firmware. Relatively straight forward! Just follow the guide on the website and you should be good.
The robot is now accessible only on the local network, and they got it working in Home Assistant. The only feature that is missing now is direct camera view, which the original robot had. Basically, you could get a live feed of the robot's camers at any time. Looked fun, but it was not necessary.
I commented elsewhere, but I once had a soundbar that just had a no password ssh login. It was one of those ‘connect to your WiFi’ to stream music through models and for whatever reason, after connecting it to my WiFi, it continued to broadcast the publicly joinable setup network.
SSH was open to both the unsecured and secured networks, so anyone within WiFi distance of the device could have gained root control of it. Or if I had a sufficiently weak network setup, anyone online could have taken control of it.
On paper all of this stuff is a great idea that would make our appliances more functional.
In reality, the best case scenario is that it’s sold to our corporate overlords so they can slap an ad on your refrigerator and sell you more plastic waste.
Worst case, it’s sold to ICE or some other fascist regime.
Worst case, it’s sold to ICE or some other fascist regime.
Every single government that has a contract with Palantir for Gotham or even whatever the fuck they're doing with the UK NHS data, is reason enough to know this kind of shit is a bad idea. The entire existence of Palantir makes this kind of shit a bad idea by default.
Even if they're not using lavender or where's daddy (yet), I do not want them to have a detailed layout of my home, in addition to all the other information already being collected.
If the day comes when any government needs to crush civil unrest, Palantir gives them an easy button to weaponize your data against you.
Wait till you find out what your wifi can do.
aw he got in my head
Was referring to this sort of bullshit. https://www.xfinity.com/hub/smart-home/wifi-motion
Sure "can" do but isn't.
That is why I have denied internet access for my robot vacuum cleaner. Xiaomi doesn't need to know the blueprint of my house, and if it can't connect to the internet, there's no need for firmware updates.
I'll start the thing by pressing the button at the top.
I’m unfamiliar with Xiaomi “smart” products, I assume there is an app to control the vacuum, if it does have an app does it still work for you strictly behind your LAN network?
It does have an app, but I'm not using it. It also doesn't work, because it can't find the vacuum on the network.
The device has 2 buttons: "turn on/off" and "find home", those are the only two I need.
A vacuum doesn't need internet access.
It's Xiaomi, of course the app will not work without internet access
The app talks to the servers, the servers talk to the robot
Talkie Toaster is here. "Howdy-doodly-do, how's it going?"
readies my fourteen-pound lump hammer
Does anyone want any toast?
Download the toaster app so you can make toast from anywhere!
I used to be on a mailing list where American companies offered money to people in the third world for menial manual tasks. Like sending pictures of random crap from different angles and such. One time I got an email offering 4 of these things and $100 and all I had to do was put one of them in my home and use it for a week and give the other 3 away. Goes without saying they're clearly a privacy nightmare.
Am I too dumb to understand why sending cartographer data is wrong?
His model is iLife A11 that has Lidar. He probably has an app that is used to control robot and shows cleaning progression. Vac 100% Lidar'd his entire home and sent data to create map in the app.
How in the fuck he thinks it is getting that map? If his ass so smart to find a killswitch and reverse it, how come he doesn't grasp that map data is sent to a server though which he ca use vac app? Like in what world is it not obvious?
Not even gonna discuss about TOS he signed, or that it is general cheap brand cheap but super smart model for it's price.
Unless some FOSS firmware and software is installed, that thing most certainly will ping back home every chance it gets.
Sidenote: My TV now is offline cause when it kept calling home (ove 60% of my pi-holes querries of all time was TV), it would freeze due to pi-hole block. Once set offline - issue is gone. I also know my robo vac is pinging, but at the same time if I block it, I'll lose app controls which I wont do. Sadly, my vac doesn't support Valetudo.
I think yes, to your first question. Couldn't it just crunch the lidardata locally to feed into cartographer, I don't understand why you don't understand that this is the issue.
Yeah that issue has been around for at least a couple years now. Luckily my robovac doesn't have WiFi or bluetooth
Same. I will service and repair my goddamn 880 until it is DUST, dammit.
Sheeesh, his fucking mobile phone mapped and photographed his house long ago.
These arricles are meant to be rage bait for the techno-illiterate. As you said, cell phones mapped your house long ago as well as your smart TV, or any appliance that requires an internet connection.
People traded in their privacy for convenience.
Both can be true. Probably shouldn't make a regular practice of numbing out to this sort of info with the platitude "Big deal, my phone and facebook already have my data anyway. Might as well give you my mother's maiden name."
Privacy is not worthless just being one bad actor took it. It still is worth pursuing in all layers where possible.
Privacy may be dead as you suggest, but that doesn't compel me to dance on its grave.
Phones have never mapped your house and how would they do that? Tvs don't think it would map but yes they watch you.
+1 Indeed!
Do you have any source on this? I have never seen a similar article about phones sending a 3D map of your home to the manufacturer.
I wasn't aware about this with regards to mobile phone tbf. I know you are spied upon on your phone camera, but mapping the house with the phone? Do you mean like Dark Knight stuff?
I picture the phone doing it the way it was done in The Dark Knight. That scene when Lucius Fox was in China and had to volunteer a phone to security.
I don't care if they map my house, just give me raw access to the data. Them having access to the speaker and mic, i'm more concerned about.
I live in a prefabricated home that is a different color than my neighbor's. Can I gift them one of these robots to get a blueprint of their house? It is already easily googled but I feel that making a robot do it keeps them lower on the food chain.
He’s going to have a heart attack to find out that the floor plan to most houses are available online and have been for a long time.
With possibly objects in the house identified?
Sure. Including pictures of people shitting.
Yeah, but without the correlation that this particular fella is living there. That vacuum might've been the missing link in someone's data collection.
Houses renovate doesn't mean it's accurate.
Shit I’m scared of my home speakers echo locating my furniture and the size of my domicile
I remember about news of some Israeli intelligence operatives who jogged around their HQ only to be outed by their tracks on Strava.
I remember army officers and cia folks, specifically. It wouldn't surprise me that israel got caught as well.
I mean, UCSC researchers used WiFi to detect a human heartbeat.
Yes and who's doing that with your wifi. They had to set it up.
If you have a robot vacuum, and the robot vacuum makes a persistent map (as opposed to the older "dumber" models that just bounce around randomly), they all send that map back to some remote server. In fact, most of those robots won't even enable the mapping feature unless they're connected to the Internet (which is absolute bullshit considering most of those robots generate, process, and store that map locally, so there's literally no reason to send it off somewhere).
So your options are to just use the robot without ever connecting it to the Internet and be happy with the reduced featureset, root the robot and install Valetudo on it, or just vacuum manually. But until manufacturers are forced to let us actually own the smart devices they sell is, under no circumstances should you ever let one touch the Internet.
In case anyone's interested, there's actually open-source self-hosted robot vacuum firmware for select models
This is great, but outside the security aspects of things. What else can this firmware do that I can't with say, the roborock? Am I giving up functions?
I literally just installed this last weekend, so the docs are still pretty fresh in my mind. I still recommend you go read through that site to get the full picture and make your own informed decision, but here's my tl:dr.
Valetudo, first and foremost, is intended to enable select models of vacuum robots to operate cloud-free. It's not intended (nor is it feasible) to offer feature-parity with the manufacturers' firmware/apps/cloud services. But in my limited experience, the only feature my robot is missing after installing valetudo is the ability to live-stream video from the onboard camera, which isn't a big deal at all for me (and is something that the dev specifically won't support). Everything else works flawlessly so far. It also allows you to configure just about anything the robot supports configurability for, like pathing algorithm adjustments, obstacle avoidance sensitivity adjustments, and a whole host of other things. I'm not sure if the manufacturer's app even allows that level of configurability (because I never installed it), but I definitely feel like I have full control over my robot, and it functions flawlessly at performing its job of keeping my floors clean.
I think the biggest thing to be aware of is the rooting/installation process may require some soldering (not of the robot, just some through-hole soldering on a separate breakout board to make connecting to the robot's debug port more foolproof), and requires comfortability in a Linux terminal. If those things aren't in your wheelhouse, I'd say this project probably isn't for you.
Unfortunately you'll have to do your own research, I only know this exists and have never used it because my vacuum is incompatible.
Such a boring dystopia :/
I don't understand why these devices need an internet connection?
To upload a map of your home duh
Because people are not taught the basics of Lan network vs Wan network and corporations love to exploit this.
During the aws outage i heard multiple people be upset with their isp because “the wifi is broken”
I worked in tech support for several years last decade... and the amount of people who tell me 'my Facebook isn't working' to mean their internet connection is bust is insane. And they aren't getting any smarter. Last time I worked tech support was in 2021 and I got fired when I nearly lost my shit with an American client who demanded to know why he couldn't enter a company store without a mask.
"secret". Sweet summer child, you've been mapped down to your quarks for decades, and building plans have been at Town Hall since... Louis XIV?
It reminds me of when Google added everyone's phone numbers to search. Everyone freaked out. "What do you mean anyone can find my number?!" And this is back when phone books were ubiquitous.
It's pointless now as anyone actually making a call (scammers) buys numbers from providers or other thieves. But it's really interesting how publicly available data being more publicity available can be scary.
I mean, this has been known about for pretty much all smart vacuums.
But who the fuck is going to use the layout of your house for anything?
The secret police
I feel the same way, I dont care really care about them knowing my house layout, but they shouldn't. We cant let companies get away with infringing on our freedoms and privacy.
I've been looking into robotic lawnmowers, and they're basically the same. The more primitive ones have a hall effect sensor under their snout feeling for a wire you bury around the edge of your yard, and do the "go until you hit something, turn a random amount, repeat until low battery, follow perimeter to dock" or they require phoning home in some way, shape or form.
Meanwhile, some guy's got an open source system that runs on a Raspberry Pi on the mower itself.
I guess I'm willing to believe that some of the LIDAR or camera-only guided mowers need some serious processing power to create the maps they use for guidance around the yard, and that's more practical to do on the company's servers than on the device itself...except not really; we've got decently powerful ARM SoCs that don't cost much, don't take a lot of power to run, and can do that job. The reality is, you can't get a pedometer app for a smart phone that doesn't broadcast sensor telemetry to two continents these days.
I bought a $300 fake Roomba thing. It was on clearance.
And i fought against it for years. But ended it up coming in clutch for a lot of reasons.
It did not have an app, just a IR controller. Its pretty dumb. It bumps into everything. It gets stuck under things. I sometimes have to create a maze so it cleans a specific spot.
Its been a habit of mines to avoid anything with an app that requires internet access. But the product lines are shrinking, and I know at some point, if I want a Roomba, I'll need to invite always-on AI or whatever.
You can have the best of both worlds. There's a lot of smart home stuff that isn't owned by a corporation. For vacuums, Valetudo is amazing and fun to set up, if not a little nerve wracking risking bricking your expensive appliance.
There's some models that work with Matter and a local home server. There's also a couple you can flash with open source software to keep it all local.
For those interested, there are some vacuum models listed on this project: https://valetudo.cloud/
It can get technical (since they want people to learn), but the documentation is pretty detailed.
It's funny how these "smart" appliances are all addressing things radically important for households, but in a poisoned way from the beginning. As if those making them were just trying to get there first and win the bank.
There's a problem of scale in industrial innovations, where bigger scale makes cost of production of something and cost for the consumer and network effect power better, meaning that there's no market feedback to help those who came first get old and die to make space for those who come next.
I think this tendency is actually the solution - there is a feedback, it's that lacking feedbacks on one level prohibits those undying monsters from being competitive on the next one. The niche of non-poisoned smart appliances won't be filled by anything big, for example.
That's also another funny moment - instead of dedicated appliances it makes it useful to have one universal one (basically a butler robot) that can be programmed. It's an incentive in the direction of universal machines programmed by customers.
BTW, imagine a frame with various manipulators and sensors attached to an RPi via GPIO, where every manipulator/sensor can be whatever thing at all, just needs to have a manipulator/sensor description template. The OS of the RPi itself runs tasks of the "move those items of fragility categories such and such to such and such locations, remove dust and dirt from that surface, wash that window", for which the existing set of manipulators/sensors and task sequence are optimized without user's involvement (other than attaching them and providing the right description templates, though I suppose manipulator controllers can provide them too, and confirming the resulting jobs). That's also where those LLMs etc are good enough, to interpret instructions and display the sequence of actions they are going to perform to get user's confirmation. This way you won't have to fear that you tell it something harmless and it starts a fire in the room.
Such a system needs a set of standard protocols for the sensors\manipulators, their description templates, and the representation of commands deciphered from human speech to a set of tasks, and the spaces and traits of objects. The programs visualizing the resulting offered set of tasks, deciphering the order, optimizing one set of tasks into a better one, and so on, should be pluggable. Suppose everything's already made, just nobody really needs a thing that they can't just buy and turn on.
OK, I like imagining, should work better instead and start my toy the weekends after the next ones (I suspect I won't start it even by then, at least not in the initial ideologically good form ; nothing about robotics or home appliances). Spent these weekends on making a POV-Ray scene instead.
Why did I even write this.
ahh actions which would be considered "hackers stealing your personal info" twenty years ago is now something people (including me) pay money to be subjected to.
BDSM is a thing
these "smart" appliances are all addressing things radically important for households
Are they, though?
Most of these "smart" functions are at best a slight convenience. And a lot of the "smart" functions in most of them don't really add anything useful to the user experience.
Sure, if your physically able to do it all that is.
Things like these are important to disabled folks.
Yes, they are, it's very convenient to have the same thing boil the water and make tea for you, or do the laundry and dry it, or do the floor and the windows when you can be busy with something else, same with cooking. Especially remote-controlled when you are an hour away. And it's not a slight convenience, it's life-changing like remote work.
Couldn't someone just google the photos of the house that the realtor took and then compile a map? 🤔
Every gadget spies on you if you think about it.
or......just buy a vacuum cleaner and vacuum your house? you don't need smart devices for everything.
Vacuuming your place while you go get groceries is pretty nice, according to my late mother. And her favorite feature was: the thing easily fit under the bed, so she didn't have to remind herself she was not as spry as she used to be.
At first I thought ”Well, duh!”, but the manufacturer having a remote kill switch when he network blocked his vacuum from sharing his home map data with them, as well as unprotected root access when connecting to the vacuum… urgh.
All crappy IoT devices ever made. They aren't used in bot nets all the time because hackers like the challenge of hacking them so much. Security simply isn't a priority.
The 'S' on IoT stands for security!
Is it just me, or is having ADB exposed physically not that big a deal?
Tend to agree, security is always the goal but if someone is in my house hacking my vacuum, I have bigger issues. The no-notice remote kill is the bigger issue to me.
It is not good. But in most cases just adb doesnt grand root access. That's just bad.
A few years ago I noticed an annoyance with a soundbar I had. After allowing it onto my WiFi network so we could stream music to it, it still broadcast the setup WiFi network.
While dorking around one day, I ran a port scan on my network and the soundbar reported port 22 (ssh) was open. I was able to log in as root and no password.
After a moment of “huh, that’s terrible security.” I connected to the (publicly open) setup network, ssh’d in, and copied the wpa_supplicant.conf file from the device to verify it had my WiFi info available to anyone with at least my mediocre skill level. I then factory reset the device, never to entrust it with any credentials again.
Name and shame, what make and model was it?
There was an ARS article years ago about it...