On building safe bridges
Cool gadgets give us some really great possibilities, like tracking our
activities, controlling music and smart home devices, receiving notifications
and more. But in our strive for better, faster, lighter, smarter, cheaper... we
often forget the down side of our endeavors. Apps providing connections to our
devices do receive all our movement information, including precise location. We
have written about it previously, in 2017. But maybe
you do not care about the details of your whereabouts being shared and only
care about your communication. And your communication with friends and family
is surely safe with secure apps that have become widely popular, right? But
unfortunately, every notification that is forwarded to your smart bracelet even
though you received it from some very secure, end to end encrypted app like
Matrix or Signal, has been seen by the bracelet's companion app. These are
closed source applications provided mostly by the vendor of the gadget and it
is only up to the vendor to decide if they send these conversations to their
servers for further processing. It is now up to us to decide if we want to give
them fully detailed view into our lives.