Cause for concern?
Not exactly new news.
8 Jun 2020
Concern, yes. Something you can reasonably do something about (without investing in an IoT VLAN and outbound traffic filtering), no.
Don’t buy stuff that talks back to a cloud service unless you have no other choice and the manufacturer has a good track record of providing updates.
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Yes security and privacy is a continuous concern and there is (at least in the US, others can tell is about other parts of the world) currently no regulation on security components so it continues to be buyer beware as it always has. It could be an issue for you if you plug your device in…
White goods vendors have been getting together (the csa has another working group similar to but not matter) to discuss standardizing this. But like matter even if they start two years ago (which they did) it will take years for a standard to emerge and a couple more to hammer out the incompatibilities. You’ll get that standard sometime in the 2026-2027 range most likely.
In the US at least security is being looked at on the federal level with labels (a-LA energy star) to identify vendors who are at least attempting a security baseline (note label doesn’t guarantee secure) but in that case it’s REAL use case is so vendors who are actually trying can differentiate themselves from those who do ZERO testing and security maintenance to justify thier higher cost. (which IMHO is necessary - just see how many people join this very discussion boards to ask about the ‘cheapest’ whatever.
Unfortunately perpetual security fort the life of a white good product (appliances, ~10yrs)is triple that for your average long span PC and brings the manufacturer no additional revenue. And they need to be able to pay for it or they won’t do it.
Meanwhile if you think it’s an issue I haven’t run into a single one of these you can’t pull the network cable or just not connect it to WiFi