Man Alarmed to Discover His Smart Vacuum Was Broadcasting a Secret Map of His House

"Narayanan had been letting his iLife A11 smart vacuum - a popular gadget that's gained mainstream media coverage - do its thing for about a year, before he became curious about its inner workings. "I'm a bit paranoid - the good kind of paranoid," he wrote. "So, I decided to monitor its network traffic, as I would with any so-called smart device." Within minutes, he discovered a "steady stream" of data being sent to servers "halfway across the world.""

""My robot vacuum was constantly communicating with its manufacturer, transmitting logs and telemetry that I had never consented to share," Narayanan wrote. "That's when I made my first mistake: I decided to stop it." The engineer says he stopped the device from broadcasting data, though kept the other network traffic - like firmware updates - running like usual. The vacuum kept cleaning for a few days after, until early one morning when it refused to boot up."

""I sent it for repair. The service center assured me, 'It works perfectly here, sir,'" he wrote. "They sent it back, and - miraculously - it worked again for a few days. Then, it died once more." Narayanan would repeat this process several times, until eventually the service center refused any more work, saying the device was no long in warranty. "Just like that, my $300 smart vacuum transformed into a mere paperweight," the techie wrote."

A user monitored an iLife A11 smart vacuum and found a continuous stream of logs and telemetry being sent to remote servers. The device was transmitting intimate data without user consent while performing regular cleaning tasks. The user disabled the vacuum's outbound telemetry broadcasting but left firmware updates enabled. Shortly afterward the vacuum intermittently refused to boot and repeatedly failed after repair attempts, eventually becoming unusable and out of warranty. The user then disassembled and began reverse engineering the vacuum to determine why blocking telemetry caused the device to be bricked.

Read at Futurism