Your precise GPS locations (which are also sent to their servers). Your WiFi network name. The IDs of nearby cell towers (even with no SIM card inserted, also sent to their servers). Your internet-facing IP address. The user token used by the device to authenticate with Rabbit's back-end API. Base64-encoded MP3s of everything the Rabbit has ever spoken to you (and the text transcript thereof).
Nasty :0
Is this sent to the server all the time? Or just with requests? It shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone that a device designed to respond to questions like "What's a good restaurant near me?" is also sending location context with requests.
If they're sending a constant stream of location all the time for no reason, that would be concerning.
> Your WiFi network name. ... Your internet-facing IP address. The user token used by the device to authenticate with Rabbit's back-end API.
A device must store WiFi network names to reconnect to them. An IP address showing up in local logs isn't really surprising either.
Storing the user access token on the device is also a necessity for reconnecting without logging back in every time you turn it on. The fact that it's stored directly in logs isn't a good practice, but when those logs are stored on the same storage as the db or config file that contains them, it's also not really a new issue by itself. If they were uploading logs directly to their servers, that would be an issue of course.
That’s a weak excuse IMO. Firstly, the WiFi logic is probably entirely handled by Android, so the app doesn’t have to do anything with that. And that also doesn’t explain the WiFi names in logs. Or are they parsing their own logs to determine which WiFi to connect to? If it’s some structured data or a database, I would get it, but they surely aren’t logging something to reconnect to the mentioned WiFi names later.
The app handles the process of connecting to a WiFi network.
It doesn't have a standard Android interface. The only interface is through the Rabbit app, so by definition the app must also handle WiFi at some point.
The already released an update to reduce logging before this blog was posted.
I'm not defending their initial over-logging as a good security choice, but I do think it's being greatly exaggerated in this comment section. If you could access the device's storage, you could access the WiFi network name, period. The fact that it's in the logs, not just the config files/db, doesn't raise the severity of any vulnerabilities.
Also, logging WiFi connections theoretically does raise the severity of vulnerabilities because it stores metadata you wouldn’t have if you only store all access points you ever connected to. If you have an access point called „tabledance gentleman’s club guest“ in your access point list, I know you probably went there once. If you’ve been married for a year and I see that you still connect to it every Saturday evening, that’s a lot more sensitive.
Per the article, this is a new development. It originally shipped with the Settings app, albeit hidden. They could have easily linked to the WiFi page; I have a hotspot which does just that but overall obscures the Settings page away.
> They could have easily linked to the WiFi page;
The device has an extremely small display and no keyboard. The stock WiFi settings app would not be a good experience.
It's probably useful for knowing roughly where you are, and location is used for context. For example, you're connected to your home wifi so when you ask for the weather it can use that location quickly without looking up your location from an IP location service. I'm not saying it's a good idea, but I do see how it could be useful... not to mention locking GPS satellites more quickly.
(And yes, it is sent periodically regardless of what you're doing, not as part of specific queries)
We’ve squandered almost all of the advancements.
And the wire size is not that be - first, because most messages are small anyway (unless somebody is doing something stupid like sending files via json), and second, because HTTP compression is there and it works great for text formats like JSON.
And people are surprised software keeps being slow despite increase in compute resources. This is insane.
Yes, there is a little more effort needed for the engineers there. But ya know, if the inputs and outputs of a thing are actually DOCUMENTED and the schemas are available, it's not some massive reverse engineering feat :P
(Okay, maybe you're stuck doing something in a niche environment where handy protocol/format libraries aren't available to you; MATLAB for Microcontrollers or something. But if you're there, you're probably having fun dealing with all the nuances of implementing an efficient and safe recursive unicode text serialiser/serialiser for a format line JSON anyway :P)
Also if you're going the fairly standard route of "web API over HTTP", the protocols give us way more options readily available for much more efficient streaming of binary data.
It's not "wasting time" to teach devs that there are better ways of doing stuff. base64 encoding mp3s into JSON strings strikes me as "junior dev given 2 weeks to quickly implement something without somebody there to review and suggest alternative ways of doing stuff".
Everything you listed is an external dependency in Javascript/Python, base64 is baked in, everyone gets it, everyone's done it.
If you want better interchange you should be pushing it to be included along b64 at the language level not trying to get every dev to include extra dependencies at either side of the exchange.
Oh, absolutely. JavaScript Object Notation became a defacto standard purely because js could parse it natively. Then `json` was adopted as part of the standard python libraries, within PHP, etc... Once upon a time, even stuff like base64 encoding/decoding required someone to write the code for it. Agreed, it requires pushing to get useful stuff into "batteries included" stdlibs.
We're using JavaScript Object Notation because.... Isn't the name quite telling? :-)
Also, if any, an external JSON file should be parsed, not the files themselves.
In my country, no one of these 'self-called engineers' wouldn't even earn a trade/vocational degree. Legally they wouldn't even be engineers.
There's an alternative world where everyone is performance oriented and those Rabbit devices don't run for five hours but for five days on modern batteries. Let's be real the thing is basically a Tamagochi, it should cost 50 bucks and run on chips from 2010.
If we're really honest it should run on Tamagotchi-era hardware.
Like mp3s?
But that’s exactly the complaint the GP was making here: That mp3s are being base64 encoded rather than using a transmission protocol that handles raw bytes.
So despite your counter argument, you actually agree with the GP.
There seems to be a common trend of people writing "JSON APIs" thinking that every other part of HTTP is off-limits.
The elegant thing about MIME is it allows multiple encodings and cross-references, so you can have your HTML and the images displayed in the HTML both optimally encoded in the same document, which was handy back in the time when HTML emails were taking off and marketing insisted that the fancy image signature they designed had to show every time, even when the person was reading the email offline…
Of course back then we had to encode the image in base64 anyway because of non-8-bit-clean email servers. But I digress and will go back to my rocking chair.
I have no idea which is best. Frankly it seems like there are too many choices.
Probably MessagePack, since it is JSON-like and I've actually heard of it.
I'm not sure what Avro is doing, but as a rule schema enables you to have less overhead, rather than more. The main advantage of MessagePack over schema-based formats is that it's dead-simple and mostly compatible with JSON. Schema-based formats usually need either a code generator or maintaining an annotated version of your data classes and making sure they match the schema.
(Of course, with JSON or MessagePack you might still end up using a serialization library and something like JSON Schema).
Hopefully people come around but I doubt it.
We all seem to forget that the patriot act passed 99 to 1. Whereupon…
We promptly got rid of the 1.
We have bad leaders. Look at our Presidential candidates. We won’t get better outcomes until that condition changes.
I draw the line at companies/orgs using Discord for anything.
Uploading location data with requests is a feature of the device. It's supposed to take your location into account so you can ask it questions like "What's the weather forecast?"
The article is sparse on when the information is sent to the servers. If location data is being sent with requests, that's hardly a surprise.
No. The whole product is an abstraction to different software interfaces. If it sends data, it should sent it to the weather API, not to Rabbit servers nor even log it, because the information is relevant only at that moment.
Even if they route all traffic through their backend, their should log only errors. There is really no reason to store the location history on OS level.
That's not how the device works. The weather and location data are both context inputs to an LLM. The LLM produces the response and sends it to the device. The LLM runs on the server, not the device.
You can't have the device connect to a separate weather API unless you send keys to the device, which would require per-user access credentials (good luck finding a 3rd party provider happy to do that). It would also increase the number of round trips, which increases response delay, which is one of the primary complaints about the device.
What can/does the Rabbit add to it above what a simple string concatenation would?
Weather was just an example. You can't predict every combination of weather related questions that someone might want to ask and force those into predetermined response strings.
The idea is to be able to ask things like "What days this week are best for having an afternoon picnic?" and get a reasonable answer back.
If your goal is to hide as much of your personal information as possible from 3rd parties, you're not in the target audience for these products. Nothing wrong with that, it's just targeted at a different demographic of people.
The llm is there to understand that you've said "what's the weather?" not, say "call me an uber", and then to collate the responses from potentially several calls to websites and produce a natural language response.
There is a layer of upsell/hustle/scam[1] on top of that where they said they had a "large action model" which learned your preferences and understood how all these websites worked sematically so the actions would be robust etc and a bunch of other stuff which turned out not to be true.
[1] depending on your point of view. I would encourage people to watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NPOHf20slZg and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zLvFc_24vSM and do whatever personal research and make their own minds up
Typically the LLM queries external tools as appropriate and then incorporates the result into the response.
However, in these days weather APIs are the ones you can actually query without API keys.
See, for example. https://www.weather.gov/documentation/services-web-api
There is a forecast for you:
`curl -X GET "https://api.weather.gov/gridpoints/TOP/31,80/forecast" \ -H "Accept: application/geo+json" `
All the third-party APIs for weather just try to artificially monetize them, because under the hood the information is typically governmental funded.
See, for example, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40589172
1) IF you wanted a device like this to work seamlessly and magically, it needs to constantly be listening/seeing/sending location. Local inference is where this will actually work, and I don't understand who'd want to give this company money to buy something Apple will make a much better version of in 5 years, but if you do - this is the way to do it
2) We can't hate megacorps and then expect startups to make good products without data. Rabbit would need this data for any chance of creating something better in the future
1. This is just a tiny fraction of the violations they've done.
2. I trust big corporations to have better data categorization and secure storage.
3. If big corporations misuse data, they are liable to a pretty large class action lawsuit. There's not much recourse in the case of Rabbit.
4. There's no good reason to collect and send cell tower data back to their servers for their use case.
I've worked at mega corps and I do not.
>3. If big corporations misuse data, they are liable to a pretty large class action lawsuit. There's not much recourse in the case of Rabbit.
Not in the US.
>4. There's no good reason to collect and send cell tower data back to their servers for their use case.
There is no reason to collect most of the data mega corps do either.
With all these circumstances it's you who have to defend it - as I see it the real product here is your data.
It's just sad that people can get away with such schemes and it's more sad that law enforcement will let them do it as long as they get access to the data, see recent changes to Google Timeline.
How so?
While I understand that the US is not the EU and there is no GDPR, I firmly believe the GDPR enforces good rules in favour of the consumer. Hence, any company that does differently - albeit legal - acts morally despicable. Americans should follow that thought more, than very often put that burden of defense unto the people.
I'd guess that to 90% of the people on the planet, any linux desktop distro would not even be a "normal" computer ("operating system", if they even know what that means).
Same when we talk a lot about a particular subject. We found out she starts seeing ads quickly on related stuff.
I am not sure if it comes from android directly, her social media apps or both but something is definitely listening and analysing audio.
Which leads me to think that all FAANG and social medias companies should be sued to death because they actually ask permission to the owner of the device to get and treat personal data, but never to the people who meet them. Especially in the case of amazon echos and google home devices. A number of times when people invited me at home I raised the subject that they never warned me they had a privacy aspiring device set up at home before letting me in and I was met with puzzled looks.
Is there any actual information about this somewhere? With the insane breach of privacy policies and laws this would be, I would think many researchers would have looked into this by now.