Data leak as pipe leak
I don’t know about you but when we have some kind of problem at our house we call somebody to take care of it. I can venture in plastering and painting walls but if there’s a pipe leaking I call the plumber. If some socket doesn’t work I call the electrician.
If things go on like this I feel like everybody will soon need an IT service that you can call for security related problems much like you call the plumber when a pipe is leaky.
Anything with a WiFi enabled chip connected to your DSL can send out something and I am honestly concerned. I wouldn’t be surprised to hear the news that the audio of people having sex on the couch was found on the servers of some corporation selling devices that you can pilot via voice. The fact that just by searching you can stumble on snaps taken from a camera feed placed in the room of a baby is creepy to say the least. While you can easily notice if a pipe leaks, you might not notice that a device that you bought to simplify your life leaks information out in the public. And when you notice it might be too late.
When we bought a TV I explicitly looked for one without WiFi. Yes, our couch might have witnessed some intercourse :)
I trust Apple devices because so far they have been very clear about their approach to privacy and we didn’t witness many screw ups. We have a few Raspberry PIs which are connected to the DSL via a special and very limited WiFi connection. None of them stores credentials for streaming services. I try very hard to not buy devices off the shelf without knowing what they send out and how, but sometimes I feel like I am paddling upstream, it takes a lot of effort.
As much as I’d like to order something using my voice while I sit on an armchair I am pretty sure an Amazon Echo is not gonna be part of our furniture.