does cloud baby monitor have night vision

There is no clear legal limit on how long companies are allowed to keep data. News stories of hacked baby monitors, with attackers terrorizing families, are easy to find online.Īside from wondering about unknown third-party companies and attackers having access to sensitive data, there are related questions about where data held by manufacturers goes. This leaves the average parent with no meaningful way of knowing what bits of information are leaving the nursery, or how vulnerable the monitor is to attack.

Without a fair amount of expertise, a lot of time for digging, a tolerance for voiding warranties, and a willingness to break things, there is really no good way to know if a baby monitor contacts third-party servers or is vulnerable to security threats. Outside of the FCC compliance stamp on the back of all electronic devices, IoT products are not required to undergo testing against common standards. Even if there is nothing of value being sent, not knowing if or why your baby monitor is regularly communicating with servers in China, or anywhere, is cause for concern. These kinds of relationships with third-party providers are common in IoT devices, but rarely disclosed or openly discussed. But detailed examination of this communication did not reveal what the monitor is sending, and why.

The amount of data being sent was small, and this communication could be nothing more than part of how the monitor and app find each other. The monitor regularly contacted a server in Beijing that did not belong to the manufacturer of the baby monitor itself. “Not knowing if or why your baby monitor is regularly communicating with servers in China, or anywhere, is cause for concern.” Nat Meysenburg, technologist at New America’s Open Technology Institute As part of a project to create a testing handbook for use with this standard, my organization, the Open Technology Institute, recently tested a connected baby monitor against the Digital Standard’s protocols. One effort to raise the bar is the Digital Standard, an open-source framework for evaluating the privacy and security of connected consumer products.

When it comes to privacy and security, the IoT is somewhere between a mess and a dumpster fire. A notion of “save everything” common to the IoT has found its way into baby monitoring. This move from a market focused on children’s products to one focused on connected surveillance products creates a real possibility that data from baby monitors could be fed as training data into algorithms for other surveillance devices. Baby monitors are technically similar to home surveillance products, and are often now made by home security companies. For many, convenience and peace of mind was worth it.Ĭonnected baby monitors change the equation dramatically. The privacy trade-off, then, was straightforward there was a small risk your neighbors could listen in. These radio signals didn’t go very far, and were easily blocked by walls and trees. However, the ability to listen to neighbors’ devices was limited. The analog baby monitors of previous decades were notoriously susceptible to eavesdropping from nearby devices like cordless phones, walkie talkies, and other baby monitors, all of which operated on the same radio frequencies. Where parents used to face only a small risk of nearby snoops, connected monitors expand their concerns to include tech companies, data brokers, and intrusions from anywhere on the internet. Over time, these broadcasts expanded from audio to video, and from local live listening and viewing to internet storage of footage and health data. It is hard to imagine something more private than what happens in a small child’s bedroom, and a baby monitor’s basic function is to broadcast these moments. There have long been complicated privacy questions around baby monitors. Some allow you to record video and save it to the cloud, and some will even analyze the footage for you. Many include options like movable cameras, infrared night vision, room humidity and temperature readings, and monitoring of the baby’s breath, movement, heart rate, temperature, and more. Most new baby monitors are wifi-connected and controlled through smartphone apps. Now, they’re part of a constellation of home surveillance devices gathering huge amounts of private information.įor those whose memory of a baby monitor resembles the ubiquitous walkie-talkie styled one-way radio that was a fixture of the 1980s nursery, the array of new features may be dizzying. Like many other products in the past decade, baby monitors have moved past their analog roots, connected to your wifi network, and joined the Internet of Things (IoT).

Parents have placed baby monitors crib-side for decades, buying the tech-enabled peace of mind that comes with knowing, from a distance, if their baby is safe.

Does cloud baby monitor have night vision