There’s only one privacy feature you need in a baby monitor

Good morning! For a brief moment, there was a glimmer of hope that the U.S. might be on a path to a real data privacy law. But as my old pal Dell Cameron reported on Thursday, it still ain't happening for the foreseeable future. So the onus for your kid's privacy still falls largely on you.

Spoiler alert: I'm going to recommend a product, or at least I'm going to endorse the Consumer Reports endorsement of one: the Eufy E110 baby monitor. As a reminder, this newsletter/blog is a free project I'm undertaking for my paternity leave. I've received no compensation whatsoever from any manufacturer, but my best judgment and discussions with experts leads me to conclude they've made the right call.

Here’s how I got there, why pretty much any local baby monitor is probably fine, and why you shouldn’t use any model that connects to the internet.

I'm one of those guys who knew practically nothing about how to prepare for a baby besides frantically reading books and Reddit threads the months before my son's due date. It didn't occur to me that we would need a passive camera living in our house until my wife was in her second trimester and we started our registry.

As a cybersecurity reporter, I was more than familiar with the scores of parents who have shared nightmare stories of cybercriminals hacking baby monitors to spy on, harass, and threaten families. A hacker who gets access to your baby camera might make you part of their botnet, or sell access to a live feed of your sleeping child to pedophiles? No thank you.

Once I realized that becoming a parent means being bombarded with decisions like how to pick a safe monitor — the impulse that led me to start this newsletter — I called a few experts who I knew had kids, including Cooper Quintin, a cybersecurity researcher at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, to ask how he dealt with it. I reached out again for this week’s post.

"My advice to new parents would be, definitely don't get something that connects to the internet," he said. 

"Anytime you have a cloud service, this represents a potential attack surface that people can possibly hack into,” Cooper said. “I don't want anybody who gains access to the baby monitor cloud — which is a ridiculous combination of words — to be able to see a live video of my baby or my house." 

This is the same sentiment I've heard again and again in conversations with privacy and security experts. Nobody could name a type of baby monitor that they were confident was completely secure. But "nothing is perfect; therefore, you have no options" is not practical advice. Nor is it in the spirit of this newsletter, so here's where I landed: For most people, the most secure type of baby monitor is any one that generally fits your needs and has no option to connect to the internet.

Let me lay out why internet-connected monitors are dangerous.

The argument is simple. As I wrote earlier, a privacy-minded parent should prioritize preventing bad folks from accessing images of their kid. Pedophiles want them, and AI companies want to gobble up your family's photographs and videos to train their models. 

And you simply cannot trust any baby monitor to be unhackable. There's an enormous difference, however, between a camera that connects to the entire internet and one that only uses a signal that reaches just a few hundred feet at most. If you have reason to suspect your closest neighbors might be criminal hackers or pedophiles who might have the ability and motive to break into your local monitor's video signal, that's absolutely a concern. If not, you're probably safe with any model that isn't connected to the internet.

I realize that for some parents, an internet-connected monitor sounds useful because it provides you with more options. But turn it around — what is the scenario where your kid is asleep in another room and you need to be able to tend to him at a moment's notice but a range of hundreds of feet isn't enough?

Cheaply made Internet of Things products, or products that don't have a dedicated team working on their security, get hacked all the time. Products that do have dedicated security teams get hacked all the time. Cybersecurity is an extraordinarily unsolved problem and will continue to be for years.

Cybercriminals looking to get access to a live feed or recorded video of your child sleeping have options. They may break into the company that makes the camera to gain master access to livestreams, or to view all customers' internet cloud storage of recorded video, or they may get your account login information and sign in to stare at your kid or sell access to creeps. Most anecdotes I've seen seem to be the hacker getting access to an individual's account, a perpetual bugbear for the entire cybersecurity industry. I'm also reminded of three years ago, when my friend Will Turton broke the news that a hacker group had breached Verkada, a major cloud security camera company, and got access to some 150,000 customers' feeds in real time.

Some of these cameras have some security measures, but none are foolproof, so I'm reluctant to rank internet-connected cameras by which ones have decent cybersecurity features versus which have practically none.

I called Allen St. John, the senior privacy editor at Consumer Reports, which does exhaustive testing of baby monitors, including for privacy. All internet-connected baby monitors had potential vulnerabilities, though some were more egregious than others, he told me. You can check out their entire rundown, but their highest rated monitor, which of course has no internet connection, is the Eufy’s local internet monitor, which currently is the E110.

As it happens, Wired also has a baby monitor guide. Their best overall monitor is wifi-enabled, and I obviously can’t get behind that, but they also choose the Eufy as the best local one they tested.

So there you have it. The Eufy E110, or whatever they call their local monitor by the time you read this. Or any of the other half dozen or so well-reviewed local baby monitors. Just avoid the internet.

Ps: I still want to hear your parental privacy etiquette questions or stories. Did a conversation where you asked somebody to take down a photo of your kid go better or more poorly than expected? Please let me know at [email protected]. I'll obscure any personal information in your anecdote unless you explicitly tell me that isn't necessary.