Carnegie Mellon Researchers Design 'Nutrition Label' For The Internet Of Broken Things

Carnegie Mellon Researchers Design 'Nutrition Label' For The Internet Of Broken Things

3 years ago
Anonymous $-9GJQVHNr8

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200601/08374144620/carnegie-mellon-researchers-design-nutrition-label-internet-broken-things.shtml

Thanks to a laundry list of lazy companies, everything from your Barbie doll to your tea kettle are now hackable. Worse, these devices are now being quickly incorporated into some of the largest botnets ever built, resulting in devastating and historic DDoS attacks. In short: thanks to "internet of things" companies that prioritized profits over consumer privacy and the safety of the internet, we're now facing a security and privacy dumpster fire that many experts believe will, sooner or later, result in even bigger security and privacy headaches than we're seeing today.

One problem is that consumers often don't know what they're buying, which is why groups like Consumer Reports have been working on an open source standard to include security and privacy issues in product reviews. Another big problem is that these devices are rarely designed with GUIs that provide transparent insight into what these devices are doing online. And unless users have a semi-sophisticated familiarity with monitoring their internet traffic via a router, they likely have no idea that their shiny new internet-connected doo-dad is putting themselves, and others, at risk.