I really like the idea of a smart home. The Irreal bunker hasn’t gone crazy but we do have our TV, many of our lights, our security camera, and our front door locks integrated into the Apple Smart Home environment. One conspicuously missing item is a smart vacuum cleaner. The allure is palpable: set it up once and never worry about vacuuming your floors again.
Still, I keep hearing stories about how these devices send data, including a map of your house, back to the mother ship. On the one hand, it’s easy to understand collecting some mapping data to help guide the cleaner but why would you need to do it more than once and why couldn’t this data be handled locally on the device? Really, what reason is there for the device to be talking to remote servers regularly? It’s easy to dismiss a lot of this as coming from the tin foil hat brigade but it’s always made me wary.
Now Code Tiger over at Small World provides us with some persuasive data. He is, as he says, a bit paranoid so he decided to monitor his vacuum’s network traffic. He noticed that his vacuum cleaner was constantly communicating with a server half way across the world, as he put it, transmitting logs and telemetry that he hadn’t consented to share.
So he decided to block the logs and telemetry. In a few days, it refused to power on. He took it to the repair center and it worked fine. When he brought it home it would work for a short time and then refuse to power on again. After a few iterations of this, the repair center refused to work on it any longer.
It turns out that Code Tiger is not merely a software guy but also knows a lot about hardware. So he took his vacuum cleaner apart of figured out exactly how it worked. That means what every sensor, chip, and component did. He also discovered that the whole thing was a Linux system and, shockingly, that it was possible to log into the system. You can read the details on his post but the TL;DR is that the mother ship had sent a kill command bricking the cleaner in revenge for his blocking its surveillance.
Since he had access to the system, that was easily reversed and now his vacuum cleaner is happily cleaning his floors without the need to phone home. The whole thing reminds me of the old joke that even the paranoid have enemies.