This is quite a week for the tinfoil hat brigade. I’ve been seeing two particular stories over and over in my social network feed and I feel compelled to address them.
Let’s talk about the rant about social network and photos first. I’m not going to link to it, because I don’t want to see this idiot getting any traffic from me. Here are the basics: In case you weren’t aware, your smartphone tags photos by location. The rant warns you that people may track your kids that way via social networking.
There are so many things wrong with this. The most basic is that geotagging photos is nothing new (indeed, the rant is from 2010), and social network sites actually strip that data out of the photo when uploading. Mind you, it’s easy to track people via social networking, but that has more to do with oversharing than evil tech in your phone.
Post your vacation photos after you get back or you could home to this.
Evil tech, by the way, that can be turned off. This leads to the next part of my rant. Have you caught the story of the hacked baby monitor? A Houston-area family was shocked when it heard insults coming from the child’s baby monitor. I’m not going to get into what kind of flawed person gets his jollies yelling obscenities at a pre-verbal child, but I would like to note that this is crazy easy. Seriously.
The average consumer is using off-the-shelf technology. Most people don’t do anything beyond turn it on. We’re talking skipping the most basic step, like securing your wireless network. So, while Marc Gilbert claims to have secured his router by making it password protected and enabled the firewall, I respectfully question that he did more than the bare minimum. For example, if Gilbert is on AT&T U-Verse, the default password is printed right on the router. If you use them, the first thing you should do is change that. Unless you implicitly trust everyone who ever walks in your house.
I once had a client who thought that the wireless signal magically stopped at his walls. Meanwhile, his kids had unencrypted, shared folders full of stuff that I could easily browse to. Right now, from my desk, I can see someone’s router. It’s named linksys. A quick search shows the default address for the router, and I happen to already know the default. Suddenly, I have access to to do a whole lot of damage. I barely resisted the urge to change the broadcast ID to “Secure Your Damn Network” and logged off, wary of the fact that what I was doing constitutes a form of criminal trespass in some areas.
Stripes are slimming, but not my style.
I know not everyone is a power user, but there’s still the application of basic common sense. Would you buy a house without having the locks changed? Of course not. Leaving default settings of any kind is leaving your house unlocked. It’s as bad as using the same password for all your services or not backing your computer up. If you’re really worried about the geotagging from the first story, then you can turn that off too. In fact, you have to opt into it on most mobile operating systems. Just a note if you do opt out: Good luck getting your phone back if it’s lost; those services use your GPS too.
There needs to be less hyperbolic stories about non-existent flaws and more actual education about what real security is. If your phone doesn’t have a password on the lock screen, then you’ve lost all right to scream “somebody think of the children.” If you’re really so concerned about your children’s security, then don’t give them a Facebook account. Or, you know, hook the baby monitor up to the internet.
In a world where you can control your thermostat, car, and the very locks to your house via the internet, people need to learn to separate the real threats from the malarkey. If you can’t, save us all the trouble and shoot your laptop now.
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