Mommy, Daddy, I Want a Smartwatch.

Mommy, Daddy, I want a watch like yours!

Do you know what information your child’s smartwatch is sending?

When your child comes to you this Christmas and asks for that cute Smartwatch, as a parent you probably will do your research. You’ll be amazed, these children's smartwatches are not only attractive to kids with their colors and other fun looks, but their appeal to parents with built-in GPS / LBS / Wi-Fi tracking modules will show the child’s location on a map in the mobile application, an SOS button that will immediately inform adults about a non-standard situation, audio and video calls allow parents to stay in touch, and the IP67 degree of protection against water and dust will allow your child to play and wash their hands thoroughly without removing the watch. What parent or kid wouldn’t want one.

But, please don’t be deceived!

A recent analysis of 4 popular children’s smartwatches, done by?Dr. Web, a Russian Based Security Firm?revealed some disturbing information.?

You can read the full article?here, but I will summarize.?

In one of the models, it was found that all the information the watch was gathering was sent back to servers located outside of both Russia and the U.S. this information included the user’s mobile phone number and SIM card information, geolocation data, and information about the device itself. In response, it can receive commands to change the frequency of requests to the server, update the watch, download, install, run and uninstall apps, and load web pages.

Did you read that it sends your child's Geolocation back to their servers?

Are you kidding me??

I won’t state the obvious here, but I surely would not want my child's location and other data sent anywhere, let alone a country or servers I don’t know where they are, outside the U.S.

Let me be clear, statistically, the idea that your child might be targeted is very low and I’m definitely not intending to say differently. But, just knowing the little bit above, and I would highly suggest either reading the full article at?Dr. Webs site?or listening to this week's episode of?Security Now?with Leo Laporte and Steve Gibson (two of the most trusted and respected people in Security and IT). I can assure you, I would never allow my child to have one of these “tracking” devices. Knowing they can silently send confidential information to third-party services, execute malicious functionalities, and put children in danger if cyber criminals hack and control these devices and possibly sell the information to other criminals discourages me from ever wanting my child to have one of these devices.

If your child must have a cool smartwatch for Christmas, please be sure to choose it’s developer and manufacturer wisely, and please consider, very strongly, NOT purchasing a sub $50 watch.