UK consumer champion Which? wants you to know that your air fryer might be spying on you and sharing your data with third parties for marketing purposes.
The perhaps not-so-surprising findings from the buyer's friend are that smart devices in general are engaged in surveillance of their owners, and that data collection often goes "well beyond" what is necessary for the functioning of the product.
Although
Which? is a UK organization – a wholly owned subsidiary of the Consumers' Association – its findings will apply just as much to devices sold in other countries.
Testing out products across four categories, the outfit discovered that all three air fryers it looked at wanted permission to record audio on the user's phone, for no specified reason.
One wanted to know gender and date of birth when setting up an owner account, while the Xiaomi app linked to its air fryer was found to be connected with trackers from Facebook, Pangle (the ad network of TikTok for Business), and Chinese tech giant Tencent.
Air fryers from brands Aigostar and Xiaomi both sent the owner's personal data to servers in China – although this was flagged in the privacy notice, for what it's worth.
This prompts the obvious question: why the heck would you want an air fryer that connects to other devices?
The other categories of hardware that Which? looked at were smartwatches, smart speakers, and smart TVs.
www.theregister.com
