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That Electric Toothbrush Botnet Story Is Totally Fake
(gizmodo.com)
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this post was submitted on 09 Feb 2024
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It's not hate. It's confusion. I have no earthly idea why I'd want my toothbrush to connect to anything.
I was playing around with one because I like to fuck around with weird stupid IoT things.
I don’t have it connected anymore, but I bought the Bluetooth motor for my Quip brush. It was initially interesting to document my brushing habits overtime and to highlight where I needed to focus attention.
But after a week or two of that, I got the insight I wanted and unpaired the BT motor.
If you’re super type-a, and like collecting “quantified-self” data about all the things, you’ll love it. If you’re me, you’ll say, “oh that was mildly interesting,” then never use that functionality again.
One application I've seen for this is recording your brushing patterns for your review and to recommend ways to improve your process. This is pretty useful right now considering dental hygiene literacy is criminally undertaught and uncommon even among adults.
IoT is great, it's just that companies right now are abusing it and our lack of data protection laws to extract as much personal information as physically possible. The question shouldn't be "why is my toothbrush connected to a network", it should be "why does my toothbrush need to be connected to the Internet".
Maybe the name is the problem. "Internet of Things" implies that "things" are connected to the "internet."
I could definitely see the utility of a toothbrush with a three-axis accelerometer that tracks its orientation to make sure I'm getting all of the surfaces of my teeth. But you can do that with Bluetooth, not wifi, and I don't know why the app needs access to my phone book and a monthly subscription.
If these things were built on open standards it might be better.
There are open IoT standards.
You "can" do these things in a lot of different ways, the unanswered question is what way is best. That's not just a technical question, it also depends on how easy it is to deploy to the general public. If your toothbrush uses Bluetooth then you need to pair it with something that can speak to it, whereas if it can speak to the Internet then that broadens the ability for various systems to talk to it considerably. You can run a webserver they could visit from any browser, apps for phones, etc.
There's no need for a toothbrush to have access to your phone book. But nobody's saying it should. This whole situation of "hacked toothbrushes" isn't real.