Empowering Consumer Electronic Security and Privacy Choices: Navigating the Modern Home

Currently, the casual consumer has few available resources on product security and privacy with which to inform purchasing decisions. This absence of coherent information becomes increasingly important as we incorporate an increasing level of sensors, actuators, and connectivity into the technologies in our homes. We wish to initiate a discussion on the potential utility of an organized entity which provides understandable, coherent security reviews and ratings of a large range of consumer technologies. In this paper, we first provide a background of our stance on security and privacy for consumer technologies in the modern home. We then sketch out a proposed resource for security and privacy information on consumer technologies. We discuss some of the potential benefits, obstacles to implementation, and propose potential areas of research that would improve the design of such a resource.