You Can't Opt Out - The Invisible Surveillance in Your Walls, Pockets, and Lives

The talk opens by asking what the connected devices in a typical home are doing with the data they gather, and argues that most owners never check. Naomi Brockwell describes a camera comparison her team ran, where one vendor's claim that footage stayed local did not match how its system behaved. The gap only became public after outside researchers pressed the same questions, and the vendor then rewrote its privacy policy.

The middle of the talk surveys other cases that surfaced only because someone looked closely. A school bathroom sensor with exposed microphones and an administrator backdoor was found by a student. A family's streaming box turned out to be part of the BadBox 2.0 botnet, with firmware that opened unexpected connections. A popular prayer app carried an analytics SDK that collected nearby Wi-Fi device lists and clipboard contents, and it was traced to a firm working for the US government. A cloud backup product also described its encryption in misleading terms until the company was questioned. The speaker points to data brokers and undocumented code as the reasons this kind of collection stays hidden.

The talk then argues that privacy supports the checks on power, such as whistleblowers, journalists and opposition parties. It closes with a call for security researchers to tear down devices, publish what they find and back privacy-respecting tools. The Q&A covers smart TV data collection, alternative app stores and how buying choices shape the market.