The Ring - home security

[Joe Fan]

This will creep you out
Home Security Systems | Smart Home Automation | Ring

 

[LHABSOB]

Lots of recent examples across the country. Here is a story from yesterday in DFW.
Forney family threatened, harassed through hacked Ring cameras

 

[Dionysus]

People should be very careful with installing things in their homes that connect to WiFi or integrate with an app on their phones.

Once the thing is communicating on a network, especially over the public internet, you have no idea whether that connection is secure (encrypted) or if it is easily intercepted with common network sniffing tools.

Some of these device manufacturers are not hiring good network engineers and know little to nothing about encrypting communications — or worse, they know how to do it but choose not to. Some are known to use unencrypted connections (HTTP instead of HTTPS) and simple passwords that are easily guessed.

 

[Dionysus]

The NY Times recently published a chilling piece on the increasingly-pervasive practice of location tracking via our mobile phones.

A few things you can do to minimize this (on iPhone, I’m not sure about Android but that is addressed in this related NYT article):

1. LOCATION SERVICES

On your iPhone, go to Settings > Privacy > Location Services to stop sharing your location with apps. Some (like Maps) will need it on from time to time, but most apps don’t need this info. You can set them to “Never” or “While Using the App” or “Ask Next Time” to reduce tracking of your location and reporting it back to these companies.

2. ADVERTISING

Go to Settings > Privacy > Advertising and turn on “Limit Ad Tracking” and also “Reset Advertising Identifier…” to further limit how much of your information you expose.

3. BACKGROUND APP REFRESH

Go to Settings > General > Background App Refresh and turn it off. This will prevent your iPhone from sharing location information in the background and can also help preserve battery life.