Your home WiFi network may be spying on you

 

The folks at Proton have just released a report on how your home wireless internet network may be spying on your online behavior.

When you use the internet at home, connected to everything from fitness equipment to game consoles, smartphones, and laptops, marketing companies could be watching you with a tiny piece of surveillance tech you might not even know about.

We’re talking about WiFi pods provided by companies such as Plume Design Inc., a company that has emerged as a significant player in the mesh WiFi market, with over 60 million homes running its surveillance-enabled products worldwide.

Plume has publicly claimed to champion privacy and built-in protection of user data, taking a strong stance in its messaging that it does not monetize user data. That commitment is echoed in its privacy policy, which offers users options like privacy mode and the promise of significant control over their personal information. 

But it appears Plume talks to internet users differently than it talks to internet service providers (ISPs) — its other customers:

• To you, Plume promises enhanced connectivity and better control over your smart home network.
• To ISPs, Plume promises marketing insights based on deep analysis of your online behaviors. What that means is Plume harvests and hoards a tremendous amount of sensitive data about its users — even tracking when they are present in their homes.

There's more at the link.

It appears that Plume's technology, and others like it, are being licensed to and included by other vendors, making such penetration of our privacy an industry-wide problem.  Fortunately, there are ways for the privacy-conscious to improve their security, but it's frustrating to have to stop others from snooping in the first place.  Clearly, such companies won't even ask forgiveness, much less permission, to intrude in that way.  When I entered the workforce, such behavior would have seen the company(ies) concerned ostracized by their competitors and driven out of the marketplace due to ethics concerns.  Today?  Everybody seems to be doing it.

I know many people no longer even think about privacy online, and it's certainly a truism that nothing one says online can be considered private or confidential.  Nevertheless, I'm old-school, and I do believe in maintaining my privacy whenever possible.  I won't necessarily use Proton's products and services to achieve that, but I'll take note of their recommendations, and try to incorporate them into my online time.

Peter