That shows one of the issues of the kind of centralization IoT as currently done pushes for. Breach in one company? Plenty more people impacted...
Best part of the article is probably the stated motives:
"Kottmann said their reasons for hacking are “lots of curiosity, fighting for freedom of information and against intellectual property, a huge dose of anti-capitalism, a hint of anarchism -- and it’s also just too much fun not to do it.”"
So talking about the devil being in the details... That confirms profiling is still very much in the picture (unsurprisingly) but more disturbing:
- this has implications which creates new venues for easier fingerprinting (so extra risks!)
- this is in fact not that hard to cross-reference cohort and user identity (oops, wasn't it main initial motive to prevent this?)
- thus, this will help with monitoring behavior changes over time
And of course that's to be added to the fact that targeted advertising is very much not going away. FLoC or third party cookies... pick your poison I guess?
EN: Or why our world is more and more looking like a bad dystopian sci-fi movie... EU now funding drone swarms for border control...
FR: Ou pourquoi notre monde ressemble de plus en plus à un mauvais film de science-fiction dystopique... L'Union Européenne finance maintenant des essaims de drones pour contrôler les frontières...
Some more example of surveillance capitalism as a mean to social control. Are we surprised? Not really... still they all need to be documented and known to the public.