Final year. How exciting. Everything this year is self-initiated meaning I have to construct the briefs to my projects myself. For the first project of the Digital Design Portfolio unit, I decided to focus on surveillance.
During my initial research, I explored two kinds of surveillance, CCTV surveillance and the surveillance of IoT devices in smart homes.
CCTV surveillance
A quick internet search of 'view online CCTV cameras' exposes lists of unsecured cameras streaming from peoples homes, mainly without the realisation of the CCTV owners. I can log into these cameras as the system's default credentials have not been changed, using the default username 'admin', and password as an empty field. It is worrying to see these websites exposing the live visual feeds as well as the IP address, location coordinates and postcode of these victims, making them readily available online for anybody to view.
I started to collect some data from these feeds, documenting the number of cameras the system had and the brand that was the most affected. It was interesting to find out that the majority of these unsecured cameras came from one manufacturer, Defeway. At this stage, I didn't know what I wanted to expose through my project. Maybe I could record the moments of the owners of the system and expose it to them in some sort of light-hearted way? Or maybe I could expose this issue to the manufacturer and see whether they are doing enough to protect the privacy of their customers and educate them on the security of their cameras.
Digital tools for resistance
The brief prompt seems like something that could like very well with this idea.
Quantify Me
I took a look at the 'Quantity Me' brief prompt. Maybe I could view my day through the eyes of the 400,000 million CCTV cameras in London. For example, my journey from my home to LCC. I would need to approach the buildings the CCTV cameras present and ask for the recorded footage which is possible underneath the Data Protection Act. I think it would be interesting to view your eye but through different means. Looking at yourself but not through your eyes.
There are some practical issues with this idea. It is very time-consuming. Whilst I am obliged to request CCTV footage of myself, the CCTV owner was 30 days to respond with the footage. This will most likely pass the scope of this project. Furthermore, there may be a fee with each owner I encounter, a minimum of £10. Finally, if any other person is seen in the footage, the CCTV owner can refuse to provide me with the footage without their permission. Whilst this sounds like a fun project to document and expose to the public, I don't believe it is feasible due to these practical issues. Therefore, I have decided not to move forward with it.
The Surveillance of the Smart Home
Smart home surveillance is an interesting topic that interests me. As homes becoming more and more connected to the internet through Internet of Things (IoT) devices, their security and privacy become questioned and investigated. This is exactly what a research group from Princeton University has done. This lets you spy on your IoT devices so you can see exactly who they are communicating with, and how often.
Using their tool, I decided to gather some of my data. I scanned my WiFi network at home for 6 hours and was able to see who my smart devices were communicating with. During this 6 hour period which was conducted on a Sunday and during the late evening into the morning of Monday, over 40 gigabytes of data was transmitted, less than 40 megabytes were tracking adverts, however, I wasn't sure if this was too high or too low. Nonetheless, this was very interesting to see that it was happening.
Some interesting information came from this. My smart TV box was transmitting insecure, unencrypted HTTP data over the internet to countries like 'The Republic of Korea', Singapore and Taiwan. This means hackers would be able to see what we are watching and for how long. Furthermore, smart speakers were constantly communicating with their 'home' servers even when they weren't being used and were supposedly on a 'stand-by' state. Something unusual I spotted was from our Swann camera CCTV system. Occasionally there would be very low unencrypted data and tracking adverts. If you think about it, it's very weird since it's a DVR system so the footage isn't saved in the cloud but locally. And to have tracking ads?! Why?
I think this would be so interesting to continue exploring as it is a hot topic in our society today.
I came back to this idea a few weeks later as my 'Cam Wars' interface was coming to a finish. I decided to expand my data and ran the tool for 24 hours on my home network. I did this from 9 am on Sunday morning from 9 am on Monday morning. During this time, everybody was at home and all smart home devices were in use so, it is a valid representation of how these devices act in our daily life. My idea is to create an animation which exposes the invisible communications throughout the whole day. The animation would be embedded in a website where the user can click on different times of the day to see what the devices were doing. I think it's really interesting to explore how IoT devices communicate on our networks, and with who, especially now that the smart home is something everyone wants a piece of.
Bibliography list:
Brandom, R. (2019). Nest is getting ready for the smart home’s Cambridge Analytica moment. [online] Available at: https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/16/20917096/nest-google-privacy-security-smart-home-cambridge-analytica-works-with (Accessed: 20 October 2019)
Cimpanu, C. (2019). Alexa and Google Home devices leveraged to phish and eavesdrop on users, again. Available at: https://www.zdnet.com/article/alexa-and-google-home-devices-leveraged-to-phish-and-eavesdrop-on-users-again/ (Accessed: 20 October 2019)
Dries Depoorter. (2019). portfolio. Available at: https://driesdepoorter.be/ (Accessed: 1 October 2019)
GOV.UK. (2019). Request CCTV footage of yourself. Available at: https://www.gov.uk/request-cctv-footage-of-yourself (Accessed: 1 October 2019)
Holmes, A. (2019). Google exec says Nest owners should probably warn their guests that their conversations are being recorded. Available at: https://www.pulse.ng/bi/tech/google-exec-says-nest-owners-should-probably-warn-their-guests-that-their/z1e1d5n (Accessed: 20 October 2019)
Ico.org.uk. (2019). Domestic CCTV systems - guidance for people using CCTV. Available at: https://ico.org.uk/your-data-matters/domestic-cctv-systems-guidance-for-people-using-cctv/ (Accessed: 20 October 2019)
Iot-inspector.princeton.edu. (2019). Our smart devices are watching us. Available at: https://iot-inspector.princeton.edu/ (Accessed: 1 October 2019)
Spring, T. (2019). DEF CON 2019: Researchers Demo Hacking Google Home for RCE. Available at: https://threatpost.com/def-con-2019-hacking-google-home/147170/ (Accessed: 20 October 2019)
Tuohy, P J. (2019). Google gives Works With Nest a second life for the privacy era. Available at: https://www.the-ambient.com/features/google-home-nest-nik-sathe-interview-2027 (Accessed: 20 October 2019)
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