Gift Guide

A Gift Guide to This Holiday Season’s Creepiest Surveillance Gadgets

Let your loved ones decide what privacy means to them

Thomas Smith
Debugger
Published in
9 min readNov 24, 2020

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3 different web cams facing a little figurine person.
Photo courtesy of the author

One of the best things about the holiday season is that you get to force your own privacy preferences on others.

Maybe your family member wouldn’t normally buy a watch that tells Google when they’re asleep or a doorbell that helps them inform on their neighbors. But during this brief window each year, you can make a whole variety of fraught privacy decisions for them through gift-giving! They’ll be forced to live with your privacy choices or risk offending you by returning your thoughtful, pricey gadget to the Amazon warehouse from whence it came.

You love your friends and family. Really, you do. But if your gadget choice allowed a soulless megacorporation to siphon up their personal data to feed its ever-churning grist mill of profit, maybe you’d be okay with that. Or perhaps you’d enjoy the option of remotely flying a surveillance drone around their home — or activating the camera on their smart assistant by “dropping in” without their immediate consent.

They’ll be forced to live with your privacy choices or risk offending you by returning your thoughtful…

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