I’m Dreaming Of A White Listed Christmas
Just in time for the holiday season, Mozilla released a rather depressing list of insecure devices and services sold by a number of companies which now includes Google. The Privacy Not Included list has been around for a few years, listing a variety of products which are insecure, collect and share far too much data or straight out practice illegal activities. Mozilla also lists the good guys who do respect their customers personal data, such as Garmin, and kudos to several regulators for actually doing their jobs in 2023.
Amazon has been on the naughty list for quite some time, with no evidence that they intend to change their ways. The popular Ring door camera remains vulnerable to attacks which were revealed quite some time ago, while the Dot series, Kindles and FireTV all happily harvest far more data than you would expect. Amazon doesn’t sell that data of course, they merely use it themselves to help target the ads and search results you see. Microsoft does the same with their XBox consoles, using your gaming habits to help them refine what they show you.
Google, Sonos and Bose are all newcomers this year, not just because of questionably invasive products but also because your data is now used to train their AI models. The full list can be found at The Register, who give a quick rundown of the most popular data harvesting toys, as well as the winner of the worst device of 2023.
