What your smart devices know (and share) about you | Kashmir Hill and Surya Mattu
TED Talks Daily
TED
4.1 • 12.1K Ratings
🗓️ 18 July 2018
⏱️ 9 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Once your "smart" appliances can talk to you, who else are they talking to? Kashmir Hill and Surya Mattu wanted to find out -- so they outfitted Hill's apartment with 18 different internet-connected devices and built a special router to track how often the devices contacted their servers and see what they were reporting back. The results were surprising -- and more than a little bit creepy. Learn more about what the data from your smart devices is telling companies about your sleep schedule, TV binges and even your tooth-brushing habits -- and how tech companies could use it to target and profile you. (This talk contains mature language.)
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This TED Talk features journalists Kashmir Hill and Surya Matu recorded live at TED 2018. |
| 0:08.0 | So for my birthday last year, my husband got me an Amazon Echo. |
| 0:14.0 | I was kind of shocked actually because we both work in privacy and security. |
| 0:20.0 | And this was a device that would sit in the middle of our home, both work in privacy and security. |
| 0:24.5 | And this was a device that would sit in the middle of our home with a microphone on constantly listening. |
| 0:28.2 | We're not alone, though. |
| 0:29.7 | According to a survey by NPR and Edison Research, |
| 0:32.7 | one in six American adults now has a smart speaker, |
| 0:36.6 | which means that they have a virtual assistant |
| 0:38.7 | at home. |
| 0:39.6 | Like, that's wild. |
| 0:40.9 | The future, or the future, dystopia, is getting here fast. |
| 0:45.4 | Beyond that, companies are offering us all kinds of internet-connected devices. |
| 0:50.1 | There's smart lights, smart locks, smart toilets, smart toys, smart sex toys. |
| 0:56.9 | Being smart means a device can connect to the internet, it can gather data, and it can talk to its owner. |
| 1:03.5 | But once your appliances can talk to you, who else are they going to be talking to? |
| 1:08.9 | I wanted to find out, so I went all in and turned my one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco |
| 1:13.6 | into a smart home. |
| 1:15.6 | I even connected our bed to the internet. |
| 1:18.6 | As far as I know it was just measuring our sleeping habits, |
| 1:22.6 | I can now tell you that the only thing worse than getting a terrible night's sleep |
| 1:26.6 | is to have your smart bed tell you the next day |
... |
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