Gift Guide
A Gift Guide to This Holiday Season’s Creepiest Surveillance Gadgets
Let your loved ones decide what privacy means to them
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, pricey gadget to the Amazon warehouse from whence it came.
If you need help choosing between the most egregious privacy-snubbing gadgets of 2020, look no further. Here is Debugger’s guide to the best holiday gifts that invade your loved ones’ privacy (with a little guidance from our friends at the Mozilla Foundation).
Video doorbells
Is your loved one a film and literature buff? Did they enjoy the cerebral 2006 drama The Lives of Others, about the East German Stasi? Or George Orwell’s classic novel 1984?
If so, you can help them bring a little slice of the panopticon home by getting them a video doorbell. Popular models include the Hello from Google Nest ($229), the Arlo ($149), and Amazon’s Ring 3 ($199). All video doorbells work by using an onboard camera to monitor activity at a user’s door. The Hello streams video to Google’s…
