this post was submitted on 27 Oct 2025
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Man Alarmed to Discover His Smart Vacuum Was Broadcasting a Secret Map of His House (futurism.com)
submitted 3 days ago by themachinestops@lemmy.dbzer0.com to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] bytesonbike@discuss.online 79 points 3 days ago (2 children)

In addition, Narayanan says he uncovered a suspicious line of code broadcasted from the company to the vacuum, timestamped to the exact moment it stopped working. “Someone — or something — had remotely issued a kill command,” he wrote.

“I reversed the script change and rebooted the device,” he wrote. “It came back to life instantly. They hadn’t merely incorporated a remote control feature. They had used it to permanently disable my device.”

In short, he said, the company that made the device had “the power to remotely disable devices, and used it against me for blocking their data collection… Whether it was intentional punishment or automated enforcement of ‘compliance,’ the result was the same: a consumer device had turned on its owner.”

They kill switched it remotely. Yikes.

[–] muusemuuse@sh.itjust.works 10 points 2 days ago (2 children)

All IoT devices do this to keep you from blocking their data collection. They won’t work reliably without a regular ping home. They lock up if they can’t phone home frequently enough.

[–] Taleya@aussie.zone 5 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

Tapo's sockets don't - in fact they explicitly have a 'local only' function. All you lose is control outside your home network.

Tuya on the other hand will start leeching off the fucking Bluetooth of your pairing device if you hobble them.

[–] muusemuuse@sh.itjust.works 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

tapo cameras do. mine all went offline and factory reset themselves after not having internet access or even accounts for several months, all at the same time.

[–] Taleya@aussie.zone 1 points 2 days ago

Haven't experienced that one - but your statement was "all iot devices do that" (emphasis mine)

And i haven't even touched on Zigbee....

[–] Auli@lemmy.ca 1 points 2 days ago

Haven't had one yet. Block all IOT devices from internet all work fine.

[–] Evotech@lemmy.world 7 points 2 days ago

More likely it killed itself after not being in contact with home base. Since it worked fine elsewhere