>Security is an issue but it's a separate issue. Huge organizations get pwned all the time. Yahoo, Target, Equifax, OPM, it's a very long list. If the thing holding your data gets hacked, you lose. That doesn't really depend on if it's in your home or not.
For your thing to not get hacked, someone needs go proactively defend that thing, even if defending that thing just means 'install the dang updates' (of course, there's more to it than that, but for most of us, if installing the updates isn't enough, we are compromised and deal with the consequences)
I'm comparing leaving the clock blinking 12:00 to the phone that hasn't been updated in two years. If your data is on devices you control... you need to control the security of said devices, and that's easier said than done.
My point here is that not paying attention to the security of your home appliances has very different and sometimes not obvious consequences to not paying attention to other aspects of home appliance setup.
Not really. It was because the device is a VCR (or a car) that happens to contain a clock and people didn't care enough about the clock feature to bother with setting it. Even the people whose clocks weren't set could still play a video tape or drive to work.
What it points to is the need for good defaults. The default shouldn't be to blink 12:00, nobody actually wants that. It should be to get the time from a GPS receiver or NTP server or something like that. It's a problem caused by no external connectivity, which is no longer an issue today.
> Now, with connected appliances? (as any of your 'social network' appliances would have to be) if you didn't apply the security updates (and maybe if you did) the data would be even more public than it is now.
Security is an issue but it's a separate issue. Huge organizations get pwned all the time. Yahoo, Target, Equifax, OPM, it's a very long list. If the thing holding your data gets hacked, you lose. That doesn't really depend on if it's in your home or not.