Your Toaster Is Eavesdropping
Sky News:
Three air fryers, made by the Chinese brands Xiaomi, Tencent and Aigostar, wanted to record audio on their owner's phone for no specified reason, according to the Which? study. Meanwhile, smart TVs made by Hisense and Samsung which were tested by Which? asked for people's postcodes during set-up. Samsung's TV app also asked for permission to be able to see all the other apps on the user's phone.
All of the products in the research required privacy consent to work properly and wanted to know users' precise locations.
This includes the Huawei Ultimate smartwatch which requested nine "risky" phone permissions - the most of all the devices in the study.
This is no major news. If memory serves, Samsung was eavesdropping on its TV users some 10 years ago, so the industry of smart things is far from surprising us with a toaster that listens to your phone or watches your videos and sends them to motherland.
I like though how ICO presented the action on their side: to increase the trust of the users...