The Household Items That Spy On You

By Kei Pritsker

I’m sure a lot of you saw the Ring Super Bowl commercial where they showed how Amazon’s Ring cameras surveil entire neighborhoods through a feature called Search Party. The feature allows users to upload an image of something and then all of the Ring cameras in its proximity comb through their own footage to see if that thing passed in front of them. The ad used the example of a user using Search Party to find a missing dog.

Critical observers were quick to point out that this could easily be used to spy on everyone, but it’s not just Ring that’s spying on you. Here are some common consumer items that you might not have realized are watching you right now.

Your TV. Modern TVs have something in the terms of service called Automatic Content Recognition, which basically means that your TV records everything you play on it, whether it’s Netflix, Youtube, video games or even something you watched by connecting your laptop. And disconnecting your TV from the internet doesn’t stop this. Just last month, major TV manufacturers were sued in Texas for screenshotting users' TVs every 500 milliseconds.

Your car. New cars monitor everything from your location, how fast you drive, how hard you brake, but also things like your race, weight, health, taste in music, sexual activity and trade union membership. The HALT Drunk Driving Act mandates that by 2026, all new cars have to have a mechanism that automatically turns a car off if it deems someone unfit to drive.

Your router. Xfinity recently announced its Wifi motion feature which monitors the signal strength between the router and its connected devices like printers, phones or game consoles. If someone walks between the router and the device, the router will be able to see the signal being disrupted, effectively turning it into a motion tracker. Several ISPs are rolling out similar features and marketing them as home security tools.

Smart watches. Smart watches can be used to track your personal health like counting calories or monitoring your heart rate but that information can just as easily be used to create a detailed map of your life. It reveals when you eat, when you sleep, when you’re nervous, when you’re lying, where you were, if you were on drugs, etc. Smart watch data has already been used as evidence in criminal cases.

AI assistants. Tech companies are in a race to give their AI chat bots the power to execute real world tasks like sending emails, creating to-do lists, shopping, or planning vacations. The only catch is if you want it to shop, you have to give it your credit card information. If you want it to clean up your desktop, you have to give it access to your hard drive. AI assistant Clawdbot went viral after naive users installed it only to have their assistants taken over by hackers.

The point is the Orwellian total surveillance regime isn’t going to be announced one day in a presidential address, it’s already quietly being set up in our homes at our request, with our quiet consent, and under the guise of convenience and security. The average American has 17 smart devices in their home and many companies already have cooperation agreements with law enforcement. All it would take is a catalyzing security event for this infrastructure to be weaponized against us.

It’s a sobering reminder that while we fight over Super Bowl Halftime Shows or Democrats vs. Republicans, we will all be seen as equals by the national security state.

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