Sex toy company fined £3million for spying on customers through 'smart vibrator'
A sex toy company has been ordered to pay a whopping £3 million fine after it was revealed that their "smart vibrator" was being used to track customers' usage without their knowledge or consent. Yikes!
The We-Vibe 4 Plus is a £90 vibrator that can be connected to a smartphone app via Bluetooth, allowing the user's partner to operate the device remotely, from anywhere in the world. Sounds pretty cool right? Wrong! Two hackers at the Def Con hacking conference not only revealed that the data from the dildos was being sent back to the sex toy company, but that the device could also be hacked. Meaning some neckbeard with cheeto fingers could be turning up the intensity on your wife's vibrator from the comfort of his mothers basement. Pretty horrendous right?
Standard Innovation, the company behind the vibrator were collecting data such as minute-by-minute temperature changes on the device, dates and times of use, and vibration intensity, revealing intimate information about the user's sexual habits. The hackers warned that this information was being stored on Standard Innovation's servers, along with personal information such as email addresses.
The company claimed that the data collected was for "diagnostic purposes" only (Ha, BULLSHIT) but people are having none of it. Since then, two women have filed lawsuits against the company saying that "Standard Innovation failed to warn or notify users about the date collection". What a bunch of sly fuckers. Luckily they were caught out big time and were charged with accused of violating the Federal Wiretap Act, along with other privacy and consumer protection statutes.
Now the company has to fork out 3 million smackers in compensation - or £8,000 per customer because they were sneaky bastards. Dammit! I should've bought one, I could've been 8k richer. Ah well.
As part of the settlement, Standard Innovation have agreed to destroy the information it has already collected and will stop collecting such data in the future. If you believe that you'll believe anything. They'll probably just try to be more covert about it in future. I don't know why we need all this "smart" shit anyway. Have you not seen Snowden FFS? You'll definitely be putting duct tape over your laptop mic and camera after you've seen that movie.
