Retail giants have finally stopped selling a company’s baby monitoring stuffed animals after it was discovered that audio and visual recordings were leaked online to potential hackers over a year ago.
Walmart, Amazon, and eBay are ending the sale of CloudPets baby monitoring stuffed animals after over two million devices leaked audio and visual recordings of unsuspecting children and adults.
CloudPets acknowledged the intrusion of privacy in a statement to MarketWatch, but added that users’ information wasn’t compromised.
MarketWatch exposed the leak in early April 2017, but the retailers didn’t end the sale of CloudPets until two weeks after Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a digital rights organization, wrote an open letter in May advocating for major retailers to stop selling them. (RELATED: EFF Defeats Patent Troll’s Podcast Lawsuit That Silenced Adam Carolla)
A California stay at home mom’s May 30 Facebook post detailing a potential hacker spying on a her potentially even while she was breastfeeding her baby went relatively viral.
“All of a sudden I noticed out of the corner of my eye that the camera was moving … and it was panning over to our bed,” she wrote in the Facebook post. “The exact spot that I breastfeed my son every day. Once the person watching realized I was not in bed, he panned back over to Noah asleep in his bassinet.”
“I feel so violated,” she added. “This person has watched me day in and day out in the most personal and intimate moments between my son and I. I am supposed to be my son’s protector and have failed miserably. I honestly don’t ever want to go back into my own bedroom.”
As The Daily Caller News Foundation reported on May 1, home sellers may also use baby monitoring devices to spy on potential buyers as a way of determining how interested they are in the home.
Home buyers often play a game of seeming disinterested in a house or condo as a way of lowering the price, but if they seem eager to make the purchase, home sellers can charge a higher price for it.
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