In the wake of now widely publicized glitches compromising user privacy, Google is scrambling to make changes to its smart home lineup.
Reports today show that as the first day of 2020 dawned, some users were looking at Google Nest hubs and seeing into other people’s houses through the eye of the Xiaomi video camera that is installed in some Google products.
In press responses, Xiaomi cites a recorded total of 1004 users who have encountered similar issues within the past few weeks.
According to company spokespersons, an application update meant to improve video streaming quality led to the unexpected visual data breach.
“The pictures were monochromatic and were sometimes partially corrupted, but they still showed sleeping children, full views of rooms and other private images in enough clarity to present a major security flaw,” writes Harry Domanski at Techradar.
One thing that’s interesting and sets this issue apart from other privacy violations is that the users in question did not try to hack systems or violate other users – the technology did that on its own.
By contrast, past reactions on Ring authentications came in response to deliberate video doorbell hacking and harassment
“(A user) said he wasn’t doing anything malicious when he discovered the technical flaw, and mostly found it by accident when he was testing his Xiaomi Mijia smart camera, which he bought from AliExpress in June,” writes Alfred Ng at CNet, covering one such instance of Nest malfunction.
As for the scope of Google’s Xiaomi problem, it pales in comparison to urban legends suggesting that smart home equipment users can experience strangers hacking into their baby monitors and speaking to their infant children as they lie in their cribs.
Perhaps the bogeyman of the 21st century is going to be the smart home hacker – but at least in this scenario, Google is circling the wagons to protect users. We’ll continue to bring you news about how companies are doing when it comes to regulating the power of smart home equipment in private dwellings.
