1) How they installed it 2) Where the product's support is, and how to contact them 3) How to uninstall/remove/destroy it (also useful if the robot overlords take over the world)
I know when I installed smart switches in our house, my wife didn't want to know any details other than "Which button do I press to turn all lights on and all lights off?" She didn't even want the controller app on her phone, she just texts me if she's out and thinks she forgot to turn the lights off or if she wants me to check in on the dog on the camera.
If I got hit by a bus and she had to remove it all, she can call an electrician.
In any case I doubt an abuser will want to tell his spouse how to disable everything.
But we said the same about cars, but how much more convenient is it to just put your hand on the car door handle, and it unlocks and opens for you? How much easier is it to just get into the car and hit a button to start it because the key fob is in your pocket?
They're small improvements of quality of life, but added up, and it makes for a better experience moving through the world.
Security is a HUGE issue of course, and to a large extent we need to figure it out, but there's good progress being made. And IoT devices aren't (as another comment says) just another outdated Linux box. OTA (over the air) updates are a real thing now, and done securely are as safe as updating your desktop machine at home.
I built the private ARCH pacman repo for these, and the GPG signed OTA software update mechanism running on the devices. I'm _still_ proud of it.
When the startup failed the hosting bills didn't get paid and the domains became "assets for sale" by the liquidator. Even though I'm still updating/securing things for my devices, I have no way to share those updates to the customers we sold em to...
:sigh:
People that are able bodied however, I don't think it's even that effective at managing lights, music, or whatever. It's mostly the novelty of arguing with a robot.
At least being on equal footing with everyone in the household so it's not seen as an avenue of control (which most domestic abuse scenarios are all about) would be a great first step.
In a few states I'm aware of, if you commit any form of domestic abuse and deprive the victim access to a phone, it's a separate charge. It can't/doesn't stop it from happening but it disincentivizes it by making the punishment worse.
I suspect a lot of this IoT nonsense will eventually attract the same riders. A documented history of remotely tampering with locks or lights, blasting heat in the summer and blaring music at full volume in any context will eventually become factors in a case of abuse.
Source: spent my entire childhood in a domestic abuse and domestic violence situation.
Also abusers often work very hard to make it difficult for the abused to leave: make them quit their job, cut off their outside social ties, make them pregnant against their will, etc.
There are only two viable choices:
1) Logout and/or factory reset all devices. 2) Delete the online accounts associated with all devices.
I recommend both, as otherwise there are edge cases where unsafety could remain.
Disclaimer: I did #2 when I left a long-term partner (along with a complete list of all credentials that needed to be rotated or disabled), both to be able to provide her absolute certainty that I could not somehow spy on her consummating her affair, and to ensure that I could not be placed into legal jeopardy by either of them as punishment for knowing that he existed at all. There is a serious legal risk if you retain access after moveout. Do not permit that risk to impact you.
Without an internet connection, they can still be controlled by a client that is on the same LAN as the bridge.
EDIT: Oh, yes, you’re right about the “it’s not Bluetooth” nitpick, for whatever good that is to this conversation :)
I maintain a version of your "complete list of credentials" professionally - and every time I've left a job I've supplied that list saying: "Here are the company-related credentials to which I've had access. This list is best-effort and may not be complete. Please respond acknowledging I've advised you to change these and any other credentials I've ever had access to."
Citation?
As someone who lived though both pager and cell phone adoption curves, your assertion sounds highly suspect and doesn’t match any market research I’ve ever seen. The earliest mass adopters of pagers were physicians and surgeons (high income on call demographics) followed by drug dealers (ditto) and then teenagers as the price dropped. Cell phone early adopters were heavily biased towards high wage adults who were fearful of breaking down on the road at night and needing assistance (early cell phones would fit under the seat of a car with the handset near the dash or in the glove compartment but were too big to fit in a briefcase or purse). I’m pretty sure you’ve bought into some made up revisionist urban legend here.
That's why I specifically said consumer adoption. Doctors and drug dealers had good economic reasons for buying cell phones. But considering that the earliest cell phones were up to $10,000 inflation adjusted and weren't even remotely good, there were only a handful of non-business use cases for buying them for your family members.
Mizuku Ito's book Personal, Portable, Pedestrian has a good overview of cell phone adoption and usage patterns. And there have been papers about cell phones being used for partner stalking for decades, e.g.:
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=technology+partner+stal...
Or for a more recent example, look at the uproar over Facebook instituting their Real Names policy because of how many people were using the site to stalk former intimate partners, among other issues.
The uproar over the Real Names policy had nothing to do with stalking former partners. It was about transgendered and queer individuals not wanting to be forced to use their legal/birth names rather than their transitional/post-transition names, and politically active individuals in oppressive countries not wanting to be publicly identified by their legal names on a publicly accessible website.
TIL doctors and drug dealers are not consumers.