Devices that quietly watch you are drawing scrutiny

A post says every Mac ships with an undocumented family-member classifier. A thread on consumer brain-wave headsets covers the privacy risk of selling neural data, with a commenter citing a 2012 paper on side-channel attacks via brain-computer interfaces. Coldframe, a honeypot posing as a supermarket fridge controller, grew out of real attacks on refrigeration units with default logins. A commenter notes there were two successful hacks a month apart.

The older FCC Commissioner thread (37392676) on IoT security update rules fits the same pattern, with people asking for automatic updates and open firmware, and warning that vendors could abuse update access to turn features into subscriptions.

The through-line: hardware and OS vendors ship classifiers, sensors and weak defaults, and users only find out later. Skeptics note the data is shaky. One commenter distrusts Shodan data because many exposed devices turn out to be honeypots.