Air fryers make delicious roast potatoes and, it turns out, pretty decent snooping devices. Last month, the consumer group Which? issued a warning that everyday smart devices, including three Chinese-made air fryers, were “stuffed with trackers” and engaged in “excessive” surveillance. While you were cooking your dinner, it seems some of these air fryers may have been capturing your family conversations via their smartphone apps and sending data to servers abroad.
The Information Commissioner’s Office has now weighed in on the Which? report and said it will be issuing new guidance in spring 2025 about how smart device manufacturers should comply with data protection laws. I’m sure that as soon as this guidance comes out all the tech companies that are now pillaging your data will immediately change their ways and treat your personal information with the utmost respect.
On the off-chance that that doesn’t happen, however, let me issue some guidance of my own: stop buying unnecessary “smart” devices. My piping hot take is that if you bring an internet-connected object into your home in the year 2024 then you should fully expect it to be listening to you. And you should also be prepared for someone to hack it.
I mean, at this stage, nobody can really say they didn’t see it coming, can they? There have been innumerable stories recently of internet-connected household goods behaving badly. This year, for example, hackers got control of camera-equipped robot vacuums around the US and yelled obscenities at the owners. Which, while disconcerting, isn’t as bad as what happened to a woman who was helping test a vacuum in 2020: images of the woman sitting on the toilet were made available to gig workers who then uploaded them to Facebook.
Our privacy was sold off to the highest bidder a very long time ago. Every move we make, every step we take, every potato we air fry, someone is watching us. There’s not much that any of us can do individually to fight back against this constant snooping. But we can be mindful of the sort of smart devices we put in our homes. There’s no need to invite the surveillance state into your bedroom. Unless you’re into that kind of thing, of course.
• Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist. This article appears in print as part of a longer column
