Gadgetory

the home of the future will be more secure than the house of the past because it's protected by cutting-edge technology the front door has a smart lock there are cameras around the perimeter that can give us a live video feed and our front doorbell can alert us when someone's approaching all this tech is meant to instill absolute confidence that I'm as secure as I can be from any intruders but tucked away quietly in a corner of my home office is this a simple unassuming printer and in the home of the future it has the potential to be an open window to my digital self all these connected devices are somewhat like Windows you're a link to this house all of them are an opening that needs to be secured and opening into the network in this case and to your data the general security of your network is only as strong as its weakest link this is nadir Israel co-founder and CTO of armored security his job is to assess and secure computer systems all the devices we see in this home are in fact computers these are not just devices they run code they do everything your laptop can do except they lack the inherent security that you can put on your laptop so I'm used to having my computer have anti-virus software that's common but the other devices the printer these used to be dumb simple devices but now they are basically computers that printer actually runs a standard operating system a very old one too and that's very usual these days what that means it can itself contract viruses malware so it's not just a printer or a thermostat or a refrigerator or a ceiling fan or any number of devices that populate the internet of things as we learned in our last episode on connecting this home Internet of Things devices are still in their infancy as a result products are designed more often with connectivity first and security second okay so you might be asking should I be nervous that my smart light bulb could be used to hack into my bank account actually it's not likely it's rarely the case where someone would target you specifically in Europe what's more common is that you're basically a target of a wide-scale campaign that's opportunistic he's right most cyberattacks aren't targeted at specific people since they rarely make much money off any single account hackers are trying to take over thousands of accounts at a time so the best course of action is making yourself less of a target compared to other users and it's not that difficult even basic security measures can put you ahead of many others and in most cases using services like two-factor authentication would put you in the top 5% of accounts it's basically around changing passwords keeping software up-to-date closing down connections you don't use using password protection where you can everything that you can do to kind of lower your profile secure things for example when you have a car alarm it doesn't prevent a very motivated person from coming and taking your car it just makes that car less of a target of opportunity there is however another source of valuable data in the home its occupants in our home in the future I can control almost every device with just my voice alone thanks to our Alexa and a slew of Alexa enabled products but these abilities are also able to be tracked catalogued and stored building out a profile of my behaviors inside my home and for Tech's biggest companies that data on my home life is extremely valuable an analogy could be the Wild West you know and it was all about the homestead grabbing the land having the square footage where the real value was what do you own under that land we're advancing into all of this new digital interfaces while not really considering the mining rights to the real value which really is the data this is an Boysen a futurist who runs a strategic consulting business here in Texas and she doesn't see this business model changing the whole incentive is to share data and I don't see that ending a time we're going to have to add some level opt-in to that what a concept privacy as a commodity right exactly your home life becomes commodified because you can use your data as a currency you can use it to offset the costs that you otherwise would have had and then that becomes part of the business model take Vizio a TV manufacturer who made a name for themselves offering quality TVs at aggressively competitive prices part of the reason they were able to offer their product at such a reduced rate was that they were collecting and selling their users data and in 2017 Vizio had to pay two point two million dollars in fines because of illegal data collection on more than eleven million TVs despite those finds and all the bad press Vizio TVs are still popular and are still collecting this kind of data only now consumers have to choose to opt in instead of being signed up automatically but it feels like a stretch that customers would read the Terms of Service before making a purchase if you're struggling to get by you don't have the luxury to think about your privacy and then you become much more easily a target for someone who will be willing to trade their personal data for that convenience I don't have a personal assistant in my house and I don't have Alexa echo or Google home and the reason is that I don't want to be recorded 24/7 and I understand maybe the processing has to happen somewhere else but that's something that as a consumer I object to and that's why I don't have that device companies are already starting to hear the new demands and the fears from from their consumers particularly in the aftermath of the scandal with Facebook and Cambridge analytic a started a new awareness where people started to make more demands of the companies around them we didn't take a broad enough view of our responsibility and that was a big mistake and it was my mistake and I'm sorry well we're already recently seen in the EU that a sweeping new privacy legislation called gdpr which already now have huge consequences for technology companies that are collecting data I think we might be seeing some similar types of legislation perhaps not as pervasive so we're starting to see already that the tech companies are starting to adopt a much more holistic view where it's not only about what can we do technology wise but what do people actually want in their homes while governments companies and public opinion try to create order in this wild-west of data collection the best thing we can do as consumers and users of these devices is be aware of the trade-offs because if we're going to fully secure our home we need to first decide what's worth protecting thank you so much for watching now you've seen how we're securing our home in the future but what devices would you use and how would you protect them let us know in the comments below and we'll see you next week with more