Hanlon's razor, "never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity", does seem to apply to that particular one, though. But I'm no war historian or politician or something; while the security of these devices is stupidity to the point of criminal negligence, I find it hard to say for sure whether some of this might be on purpose.
Also, I wasn't thinking about security. I was thinking about intentional abuse of data, that starts with collecting and processing data that doesn't need to be done for a device to function.
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[0] - Introduced in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21691282, named after me in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21691718 :).
The CIA, NSA, DHS, etc are all much, much smarter than me, and I would use IoT to compromise targets if it were my job. So there's that data point.
> baked beans are probably OK in terms of SIGINT. Depending on how well food regulations are enforced in your area
Unless you meant the IoT part, I'd love to see regulations, let alone enforcement, there.
So, baked beans are probably OK in terms of SIGINT. Depending on how well food regulations are enforced in your area, I might or might not worry about the edibility of them, though. But on-line services are definitely suspect with respect to data handling. Doubly so, if they pop up where they shouldn't be in the first place - like e.g. IoT - as that's already evidence of a business model built on abusive relationship.