>
The obvious answer is just stop buying this junk, but how would anyone know?You don't have to know. You can safely guess. Assume anything "connected" is shouting as much as it possibly can, upstream, at all points in time. It's a cell phone app? You have location services turned on? It's streaming your position. Also, whatever else it can grab. Basically, if you've granted a permission to an app, assume it's streaming that attribute upstream, and keep things limited.
And, at all costs, prefer offline only devices. It took me a while to find some air quality sensors for my home that weren't online and App-based - but they're literally standalone displays that sniff the air and report out PM2.5/PM10/CO2/etc. I can't access them with an app, I have to walk past and look. So be it. For voltage of batteries, ffs, just use a voltmeter, or, if you care about always seeing it, install a little bulkhead voltmeter. I do this on all sorts of projects (most recently a "power toolbox" I use for stuff - battery, inverter, solar charger, USB ports, and a little voltmeter that shows pack voltage when it's powered on).
And then leave your little pocket snoops behind on a regular basis. I've gone back to carrying a regular watch on my wrist, or, when I'm feeling spicy, a pocket watch. And no cell phone, or a turned off cell phone in my backpack or something.
> Is this even solvable?
No. Because (a) most people don't care, in terms of actions they're willing to take. This app in question has had hundreds of thousands of downloads, so clearly the devices are popular enough. Saying "I care about my privacy!" is one thing, but actually living without 30,000 apps installed on your phone (shoulder surf when people are scrolling their screens in public places - I've watched people on an airplane with a iPad Pro Max or whatever have literally 20-30 screens full of icons) is pretty uncommon. and slightly inconvenient.
And, (b), politicians are largely in the pay of tech companies, or at least believe the lies about how they're bringing people together and will self regulate and... whatever.
The solutions are simply to opt out, or start using more aggressively hostile-to-profile things. Waves from Qubes-OS in a disposable VM
I don't have any other good ideas. The tech ecosystem has rotted, and I don't see any redemption for it. I work in tech, and I've been engineering my life to require less and less computer use, and I genuinely look forward to putting down a computer for the last time.