FutureFive New Zealand - Consumer technology news & reviews from the future
Story image
'Smart' vibrator allows strangers to watch
Tue, 4th Apr 2017
FYI, this story is more than a year old

Welcome to the ‘smart' era, where your phone talks back to you, drones deliver pizza, and sex toys have multiple cameras and internet access.

I've always said that perhaps some household objects should just stay dumb. Apparently the Svakom Siime Eye, an internet-connected sex toy with a built in camera, is laughably easy to hack, giving hackers access to live stream footage of… whatever it is you're filming with a vibrator.

The $250 toy, for those wondering, can actually can film and take photos inside the body and is used to share your pleasure online. This is fine, as long as you know exactly who is seeing your work. However, the audience may not actually be decided or filtered by the user. The vibrator is very easily accessed by anyone within WiFi range.

How you ask? Well, the default password for these devices is 88888888. For every single one. What this means is any stranger could easily gain access to your most intimate home movies or photoshoots, and you would have no way of knowing. Yikes.

This isn't the first time a company that works with the intimate has jeopardised personal information of customers. Recently WeVibe settled a rather hefty lawsuit after it was discovered their devices were collecting sensitive personal data and info from users without permission, and failing to tell them.

So for owners of this not-so-smart sex toy: Beware. Your alone time may not be so. You'd think a company built on the backs of privacy, intimacy and sensitive personal activities would be a little more antsy about the security of their products.