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About this tool
Privacy settings for smart speakers, video doorbells, baby monitors, robot vacuums, smart locks and smart plugs, ranked by risk.
Smart home devices listen, watch and map your home. Pick a device type to get its privacy settings ranked by risk, what data it sends, and how to lock it down. This page brings together 6 separate smart home privacy guide pages (Baby monitor, Robot vacuum, Smart lock, Smart plugs, Smart speaker, Video doorbell) so you can compare them without hunting for the right one.
Open Smart Home Privacy Guide on AltFTool — it loads instantly in your browser.
Choose your device at the top: Baby monitor, Robot vacuum, Smart lock, Smart plugs and 2 more. On a phone it is a drop-down list.
Fill in the smart home privacy guide for that device; each of the 6 options keeps its own rules, data and defaults.
Read the result, then switch device to compare. The page link keeps your device (?v=baby-monitor), so you can bookmark or share it.
Baby monitor, Robot vacuum, Smart lock and the rest sit behind one picker, so switching device takes a tap instead of a new search.
Every device keeps its own rules, numbers and defaults rather than one generic template.
The link remembers the device you picked, so a bookmark or a shared link opens straight on it.
6: Baby monitor, Robot vacuum, Smart lock, Smart plugs, Smart speaker, Video doorbell. Pick one at the top of the tool; the page link updates (for example ?v=baby-monitor) so you can bookmark or share that exact view.
Overwhelmingly through credentials rather than clever exploits: an unchanged factory password, a password reused from a site that was breached, or a camera exposed to the internet by port forwarding or UPnP so it can be found by automated scanning. Changing the default password, enabling two-factor authentication and never forwarding a port closes almost all of it.
Most connected models do, because multi-floor memory, map sharing and voice-assistant integration all need a server-side copy. A LIDAR map records room dimensions, doorways and furniture positions, so check the app's map management and privacy screens for whether storage is on-device or in the account, and delete maps you no longer use.
For a lock with no lockout, no: 10,000 combinations at two seconds a try averages about 2.8 hours of standing at the keypad. With a typical five-tries-then-60-seconds lockout the same code averages around 19 hours, and moving to six digits pushes it past a decade — so six digits plus a lockout is the practical minimum.
It is the single highest-value control for cheap IoT, because those devices get the fewest firmware updates and are the usual foothold onto a home network. A guest SSID with client isolation gets most of the benefit on ordinary consumer routers; a dedicated VLAN is better if your access point supports it.
No. The microphone is always powered, but it processes audio locally to listen for the wake word and only starts sending audio to the cloud once that word is recognised. What happens to that clip afterwards — stored indefinitely, auto-deleted, or reviewed by a human contractor — is set by your account's privacy settings, not by the always-on microphone itself.
Usually yes for genuine home security, but once the camera captures beyond your own boundary most data protection regimes expect you to justify it, minimise it and tell people it is there. In the UK the ICO says the household exemption from UK GDPR does not apply to footage of areas outside your property, so use privacy zones, put up a notice, and take proper legal advice if a neighbour formally objects.