Germany bans children's smartwatches
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
Hidden listening devices (devices with listening capability that are disguised as other harmless items) are illegal to possess or sell in Germany under existing law. The regulatory agency for this just made a press release pointing out this specific device category and that they have taken action against sellers.
German press release: https://www.bundesnetzagentur.de/SharedDocs/Pressemitteilung...
If you sell a legal device, then you cannot offer an upgrade to make it illegal.
We restrict many things that are hard to enforce but this is not a reason to refuse to try at all.
Its why I prefer a hardware killswitch on a device.
My ThinkPad T61 got one. My MBPs don't. The T61 is from 2008. The MBPs are from 2010 and 2015.
>When you drop in on your device or a contact's device, the light ring on your Echo pulses green, you connect automatically and can hear anything within range of the device
https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=...
But thanks to the devices closed nature, their manufacturers have the exclusive ability to remotely modify their workings so that the device could listen without the "owner" consent. This assuming it hasn't already been done and a single packet hidden into an update push can trigger undetectable monitoring. Technically it would be trivial to implement and trivial to turn off with another update so that it would remain undetectable in case of device hardware/firmware/software inspection.
SmartTV also should be treated as dangerous. https://bgr.com/2017/02/07/vizio-smart-tv-spying-case/ https://www.rte.ie/news/technology/2017/0308/858060-samsung-...
In only the absolute best case, the always-on microphone is backed by a local-only module that picks up the keyphrase, and sends only subsequent communications to the cloud.
Not merely microphones though, but also privacy at a whole.
The other reason is the WWII history.
Das Leben der Anderen is a very good movie with a sublime cast (including Sebastian Koch), but hardly entertaining. A somewhat entertaining movie about the GDR (DDR) is Goodbye Lenin [1], starring Daniel Brühl (Bruehl). Both movies are primary dramatic though.
I can also recommend any movie starring Jürgen Vogel [2] (Juergen). The subjects movies he's in touches upon are often thought-provoking. Although also, usually drama. I can highly recommend German cinema, I hold the authenticity of German cinema in high regard.
I'm curious about your use of the word "entertaining"...
Do you mean to exclude dramas, tragedies, or things that deal with serious subject matter? Or do you mean to say that Das Leben der Anderen isn't a good movie?
(Language is fun! :-) )
The best distinction is the one represented in Collin's English Dictionary:
entertainment (ˌɛntəˈteɪnmənt) n.
1. the act or art of entertaining or state of being entertained
2. an act, production, etc, that entertains; diversion; amusement
entertaining (ˌɛntəˈteɪnɪŋ) adj.
1. serving to entertain or give pleasure; diverting; amusingMy niece asked me to install some games on an old smartphone I let her play with. Out of about 15 I looked at, 15 asked for access to one or more of the camera, microphone, address book, location or just blanket ask for every permission under the sun. None of them needed these permissions for the actual game play of course.
How does Google find this kind of spying on children acceptable?
In reality the same arguments apply to adults, but we find it less morally repugnant because adults aren't innocent and are expected to gaurd themselves against such actions. However, it becomes more and more difficult to guard against.
This seems like a very mushy reason. I'm pretty sure the real reason is that children are not considered able to knowingly consent to many things - including contracts such as EULAs or TOS. Given this, a child is also not expected to be able make a reasoned decision about privacy tradeoffs.
The reason it's "ok" to spy on adults is that they can make an educated decision about whether they're ok with being spied on. I don't necessarily agree that this is true in practice, but I think that's the theory.
It should also be completely illegal, but the justice system can't keep up with technology. Imagine you found out that your next door neighbor has drilled a hole through the wall and fed a camera into your house - what do you do? (Call the police, certainly). Is it really any different when the camera feed isn't a physical wire but done over the internet?
We generally believe that sexual exploitation of children is worse than of an adult. We don’t allow for consensual sexual relations, creation or mere posesion of explicit material with a child.
In fact drawings of said material can get you in a lot of trouble in many, liberal, countries.
That being said, I hate what the internet has become.
That's wishful thinking. Most people can't tell the WWW from Facebook. People are so bad at writing emails that there are Workshops for Composing E-Mails which sell out quickly. Many disable SIM PINs because they forget them or don't want to bother remembering them. The people who read permissions an app requests make such a little percentage of smartphone users that they can't even be considered a minority.
I beleive we need some kind of CE for software. It's easier to make sure that your parmigiano reggiano comes from Emilia-Romagna that it is to make sure that you can rely on a certain online service provider / platform. That's simply unacceptable.
Yes, and hardware at the firmware level.
Most of them don't care.
The deeper answer is that economic incentives don't encourage minimal permissions, even if there's no malicious intent.
An app can request it, I'd like to say NO in a way that doesn't break the app. It asks for camera, fine it gets the same stock photo. It asks for location, it gets the Galapagos. It asks for microphone, it gets "Never Gonna Give You Up". Installing an app shouldn't be a binary (hah) choice.
Android apps now request permission at the time they need to use a feature, not on first install. They've basically adopted the same permissions model as Apple.
As that applies to the specific example in your comment, (1) people can verify whether or not a piece of open source software is listening and phoning home, (2) if it is spyware, a different programmer could make a fork and remove this antifeature, and (3) if they published the fork, now end users have the choice of using a version that does not track you.
Does this mean Open Source software never tracks you? Of course not. But it is much more resistant to this sort of thing.
The practical impact of such a change, even if it were forced top down by Google, is nil. Nobody outside a tiny minority of geeks treats free software as a selling point.
Overmore, your claim
> Nobody outside a tiny minority of geeks treats free software as a selling point.
is wrong. Just to give one counterexample, the European Comission is not a bunch of geeks and they strongly prefer free software.
The EC is a statistical anomaly. One agency out of how many out there?
A “paper trail” back to the contents of our gadgets that can be audited, and some people would no doubt, would be much better than
“Fu society we own it all.”
Open source is the means of production today. Let’s keep it that way.
Obviously not everyone would use the safe version because of the network effect of Google's play store. But for anyone who becomes aware of the "safe app store" and is aware of privacy risks, they'll almost certainly chose to download their apps from there.
All the more reason that things should be free software with anti-tivoization, so that the stock ROM on phones can be replaced easily. Most of android is free, but because it allows non-free parts (drivers, etc), it's a complete mess for people to tinker with devices because the method is different for every model.
You shouldn't really need root to selectively enable permissions for some apps either. The "all or nothing" approach to permissions is a poor design choice.
I don't believe that. I think there would likely be a small group of people that would audit the software to create fact finding reports and others may create patches to fix software. Of course this is still subject to abuse, but there would probably reputations for certain sources.
Similar to journalism. There are a lot of first hand sources out there but the average layman does not read them. They would rather read a summary/interpretation of the facts. This is also subject to abuse. Reputation is important.
I don't feel like that actually applies here, but if it does it should also apply to the entire smartwatch category.
This isn't true for hybrid smartwatches and fitness trackers. Those devices don't have listening devices and require tethered cell phones for internet communication, which already enables GPS tracking. It'll be interesting to see if this has been written in such a way as to exclude those or lump them in with the devices being targeted.
It's highly unlikely that anyone carries an active Microphone if they are not actively making a call with their phone.
If the concern is individuals using their own devices intentionally for spying purposes...that's relatively easy for a non-technical person to do with a smartphone if they want to.
I'm asking this mostly rhetorically, but just trying to point out that when most things these day are controlled by software that is remotely and automatically updated and installed (including firmware, baseband software, and background apps), it's nearly impossible to say something like "yes, this device has a microphone, but it's not 'listening' right now", let alone define it legally.
You hiding a phone isn't the fault of the product type, and thus only your actions might be illegal, not phones themselves.
All phones have this mode; it's a feature to consume less battery by shutting off the display when you're not using it.
http://money.cnn.com/2014/06/06/technology/security/nsa-turn...
In this case the sentence is taken from the english version of their press release regarding the cayla dolls:
https://www.bundesnetzagentur.de/SharedDocs/Pressemitteilung...
A list of translated laws can be found here, but I couldn't find the TKG among them:
https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/Teilliste_translations.ht...
For me as well this is an issue of high concern. Many parents blindly put faith in technology in their children's hands (especially in this case, where the smartwatches are marketed as a safety feature), but this may now encourage parents to be more mindful as to such decisions. In our society, we have a ravenous competition for who can grab children's attention and keep it. Perhaps if the competitors are willing to prove they have products that will actually improve a child's well-being, this game wouldn't be as odd as it seems to me now.
edit: I see now that this is only a ban on smartwatches with recording/audio capability. This makes my point somewhat irrelevant.
But even without all of this researches, I see a difference between children whose parents do not control access and those who have control.
I wonder what the future is going to look like when analog methods of communication have been eschewed for several generations. Imagine how vulnerable we will be to a massive Carrington event when most of the population is barely capable of (or incapable of) multiplication and division. Antique solar-powered calculators will be back in vogue!
Especially that last part is increasingly becoming an issue. While Germany bans "smartwatches for children", we Germans don't bat an eye about introducing expensive and delicate Apple iDevices as learning tools in schools.
On one hand that's cool on the other hand I'm not sure I like the idea of a publicly funded education system funneling kids and young adults into the closed garden of Apple and all of it is paid for by tax-payer money.
There have already been cases where parents were told that their kids had to change classes if they are not willing to buy a 500€ Apple tablet (+200€ for insurance and a case) [0]. I can only imagine how this plays out down the line; separated education based on the financial situation of parents.
[0] https://www.abendblatt.de/region/stormarn/article207832695/S...
This is very hard to do, as the parent. We live in a society in which a lot of parents not even though to reflect on this topic and to think what will happen next with their child. So often you can see how parents use the phone as a means of appeasing a child in any situation.
These children are no longer ways to come up with something. Their head is already full of forms, images from computer games, TV shows. Many of them are physically weak for their age. This is scary.
I'm not sure you understand the amount of hatred a 14 year old might have against you if you forbid him to have a smartphone.
A case could be made in court that such a restriction is illegal and a form of bad parenting.
That'll teach her to value it (and not lose/smash it like my 15yo mentee keeps doing.) It also means she probably won't have one till she's 16 or so.
Disclaimer: I actually only have a two year old. Maybe I'll change my mind in the next twelve years, who knows.
Besides, being hated by your kids from time to time is part of being a good parent.
In that respect, it makes total sense to put a blanket ban on these until regulations can put put in place that only allow the sale of devices that respect privacy.
At the end of the day if you really want a smartwatch on your child you can just buy one anyway.
The market is rarely self regulating here in the U.S., either, assuming you’re referring to people making decisions with their dollars. Rather, the market is driven by a combination of advertising, media coverage, speculative investing, and established big interests. We as a consumerist culture enjoy indulging in the illusion that we are making our own purchase decisions.
The market is more like a game of hungry hungry hippos. Yes, the balls move in all sorts of directions at many different speeds, and while they appear to be doing so in response to collisions with one another, their propulsion is a result of the hippos chasing them, chomping at them, and generally moving the board with the force of their jaws coming down.
Examples of this include diamond engagement rings, the growing size of single family homes, sugar’s infiltration of our diet, tax havens, and $1k+ phones.
Disclaimer: I apologize for hijacking your comment. Also, I understand the need for HN to ignore my comment or intensely downvote it; I know what I’m doing and saying as I post this.
Cheers.
Edit: spelling
This makes 0 sense to me. I've never had kids of my own, but women I've dated have. For most of them, just knowing that their kids are somewhere safe is certainly important.
I'm talking for small children though. With older kids (e.g. teenagers) perhaps a more consensual agreement would suit better.
Now there is a point as the kid ages where it could get creepy but I think that really depends on you a person, if you are a generally creepy person on not. For example my family of all adults share an iTunes family account to share movies and stuff, this also lets us look at each others location via find my iphone. However this isn't a problem because not of us are creepy assholes.
Maybe you shouldn't be worrying in the first place- but for those that do, it could be the proverbial knee guards and helmet that allow their kid to roam.
A GPS tracker is a long-range spying device; it feels oxymoronic to claim you're letting them out of your sight if they're wearing one. If you can't trust your kids to be out of your sight without tracking them, you don't trust them.
It's not always about trusting the kid. It's about trusting the rest of the world.
It let's me keep track of her progress and gives here a simple phone that calls mom, dad, and her 4 grand parents. She set the alarm and gets out of bed when it goes off, dresses herself, basically does all the things you'd do with a phone which has very similar attack vectors. This is the kind of thing you'd expect in a world where kids can't call you at work from the home phone.
There's no device that makes or breaks trust, that is a people problem not a technical problem. It sucks that there's not much on the market in the way of good devices. We've removed the camera and do voice only calls when needed. It's a calculated risk and it's probably never to early to start teaching kids how to be aware of security risks in the tech around them. I mean, or we could just wait until they are about 16 and we have all the bugs worked out. Just let them go crazy then.
A firmware based fix alone does not make the device easily distinguishable from one without it and the fix is not permanent, making it possible to revert the device into its illegal state.
The long-term solution is to regulate IoT devices.
When kids’ location data is unsecured and easily accessible, the tactical solution is to just fucking get rid of them.
Hitting cheap plastic with a brick is 100% more effective than waiting for legislation to pass and for device manufacturers to take action.
It's just weird.
I spent 5 seconds searching and found dozens of apps that allow you to remotely enable the microphone on a cell phone (granted, you have to install the app first, though that can also be done remotely).
Note that devices that are obviously and primarily made for recording or transmission are not affected, microphones, video cameras etc. are not illegal.
Such a premise is also inadequate to address the reality that an adult parent or guardian might let their child handle sufficiently advanced devices, unwittingly harming their children and themselves by failing to understand the product they employ. What about placing a child in a "smart" car? How do you anticipate protecting the safety and privacy of anyone under such circumstances?
https://fil.forbrukerradet.no/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/wat...
This is very different than spying on a teacher or recording audio.
You could claim this is a slippery slope that leads to more kinds of tracking (and this may be true), but I am saying that very limited tracking can be a net positive.
We have given government too much power. They ought not be our mommies.
The role of the state in a democracy is to manifest the will of the people - in this case there is a general desire for privacy, which precludes selling covert listening devices.
Does this government represent you? I assume it does not. So neither did you elect this government nor does it represent you, you did not lend it any power - this makes both "we" and "They ought not be our" rather interesting choices of words.
This ban doesn't solve that problem though. A child could wear an adult smartwatch that has a listening capability.
Here in Germany children are not just property of their parents, they are citizens in and of themselves. In this case it is the state's study to uphold their rights, which their parents are apparently not aware of or violating.
The argument that parents are somehow wise elders who know what the best thing is for their children has very little pull here.
Clearly, both the parents and the state have an interest in ensuring the health and safety of children, and when the parents fail in that responsibility, there comes a time when the state must step in.
But let's not kid ourselves. Both parents and the state can make bad choices on behalf of children.
It's really scary how much distrust some people have towards representative democracies/republics and instead think going back to some kind of de-facto anarchy where the strong rule over the weak, is somehow the "better" solution that we've never even tried before.
We have plenty of human history not involving "government", guess what it did look like? Much worse.
No disagreement here. But I think especially in this case (parents neglecting the privacy of a child) is only going to become more relevant.
There are plenty of parents already who put the entire lives of their children on the internet, without the children having any say or ability to realise how exposed they are. If the German state steps in here occasionally to remind parents that the privacy of their children, and their right to their own information ought to be respected I do not consider this a bad idea.
It's admittedly a very new situation that will require new frameworks.
I wonder why they want to ban them outright instead of not allowing them in schools. It's also not clear from the article if they are banning particular, poorly secured smart watches, or all smart watches for kids altogether. The former seems more reasonable.