Jesus would have children pick their favorite bible verse for a passphrase.
Kids' smartwatches have security problems as simple as 1-2-3
41–50 of 51 posts
Re: Kids' smartwatches have security problems as simple as 1-2-3
#42Jesus would have children pick their favorite bible verse for a passphrase.
And 99% would pick "Love thy neighbor"
Re: Kids' smartwatches have security problems as simple as 1-2-3
#43Troy Hunt has a great write-up about one such product from easily this year: https://www.troyhunt.com/how-to-track-your-kids-and-other-pe...
And he comes to the same conclusion I did: skip the cheap-ass commodity shit and go buy an Apple Watch. Series 3 can be had for US$200, plus the matching phone. Yeah, that’s a shit-ton of money. That’s what it costs to track your child and not get something from a company that scrimped on security to have an office party (documented in the article). Because the whole time I’m reading the article thinking, “oh, c’mon,…
Well said.
Despite all the valid criticism of Apple in general, you can still be reasonably sure there's not an admin panel with an admin:admin login sitting there with all your child's data. That's part of what you're paying for.
Re: Kids' smartwatches have security problems as simple as 1-2-3
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
It might be bad for the customers/users, but because everyone does it, it doesn't seem bad for the companies.
Until backlash. e.g. people ditching Fitbit because Google bought them.
Google buying your company is probably the biggest win (financially) you could wish for.
Re: Kids' smartwatches have security problems as simple as 1-2-3
#45Re: Kids' smartwatches have security problems as simple as 1-2-3
#46Jesus would have children pick their favorite bible verse for a passphrase.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21781562 and marked it off-topic.
Re: Kids' smartwatches have security problems as simple as 1-2-3
#47Re: Kids' smartwatches have security problems as simple as 1-2-3
#48It's even worse than that. Most of the GPS child watches or other trackers use a few large Chinese providers; they have little or no security on their APIs and administrative panels, (absolutely no API key authentication in at least one case, or `admin`, `admin` type defaults that don't get changed) so don't ever buy any GPS tracking watches for your child.
Which is unfortunate because there are times when I wish my kid had one. I'm not too worried about kidnapping, but there are times when I want to say come back from the park for dinner.
The Apple Watch (and Apple devices in general) allow for device tracking and location sharing with end-to-end encryption and forward secrecy[1], so it's probably the most secure and privacy-conscious option available for such things.
[1]: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/06/the-c...
Re: Kids' smartwatches have security problems as simple as 1-2-3
#49I’m a big fan of what Jiobit is doing: https://www.jiobit.com/ The core team is all ex-Moto engineers and was built from the ground up in the US. Based out of Chicago I believe.
I like those devices too, but they, and all other kids smart-watches, have the same issue - huge attach surface due to use of cloud-based third party servers to gather and display information, change configuration of the device with a parent's smartphone via an app. I, personally, don't care about that level of convenience, which imposes lower security. I would prefer information about location to arrive even via SMS…
Apple device location sharing (including Apple Watch) uses end-to-end encryption with keys shared between devices when you explicitly accept a location sharing request or explicitly turn on the Find My X functionality, which is probably the closest thing on the market to what you're looking for.
You definitely pay the premium for the effort put into it, though.
Re: Kids' smartwatches have security problems as simple as 1-2-3
#50Troy Hunt has a great write-up about one such product from easily this year: https://www.troyhunt.com/how-to-track-your-kids-and-other-pe...
And he comes to the same conclusion I did: skip the cheap-ass commodity shit and go buy an Apple Watch. Series 3 can be had for US$200, plus the matching phone. Yeah, that’s a shit-ton of money. That’s what it costs to track your child and not get something from a company that scrimped on security to have an office party (documented in the article). Because the whole time I’m reading the article thinking, “oh, c’mon,…
Watch-and-phone location sharing is a bit superfluous, since the phone will do it fine by itself.
I could see a future hypothetical standalone Apple Watching serving well in this role as a 'cheap' alternative to a smartphone, since it can already do audio Facetime calls over cellular, do basic SMS stuff, stream music, etc, while being nigh-useless for games (a factor that some parents would probably value pretty highly). The only reason one can't use it for that purpose already is the required phone tethering.