How Does AIKEA Stack Up Against the Competition?
AIKEA is unique for a couple reasons:
- Our AI Intruder Detection is fast because our AI brain is right there on the Raspberry Pi.
- Additionally, our engineers have already taught our AI to see people not faces. As people generally have two arms, two legs, and a head, AIKEA isn’t throwing tantrums out of the box when it meets a new person, it’ll just tell you about it.
- AIKEA doesn’t do facial recognition, because it thinks it’s creepy, and we do too
The little thing nobody tells you about smart cameras, is that few cameras actually have the AI brain on the device. Rather, they send what it sees to the cloud where a server spits back results over huge distances, just so you can stream video footage anywhere across the world.
The second thing they don’t tell you is, to teach an AI to detect something specific, an engineer has to spend days feeding it data to get it to behave. Your data to be specific. And even then, Nests and Rings do need a bit of help getting accustomed to their new owner’s faces and homes, and do get the occasional hiccup from time to time. For instance, while under normal circumstances Nests unlocks the door for its owner when it recognizes his or her face, one user recently found that Nest mistook him for the caped crusader, when he approached wearing his batman shirt
Hilarious as it is, we don’t tend to get upset when a security system works. But what about when it doesn’t?
A while back, security researcher Jason Doyle found an exploit that used Nest’s always open Bluetooth LE to crash the cameras. Despite being contacted about it however, Nest hasn’t done much about it, leading Doyle to take matters into his own hands and publishing the source code for the hack on github. With little to no coding required, it works by pinging long data to the camera to crash it and force a reboot, giving would be thieves and burglars a minute to a minute and a half’s time to do a quick smash and grab.
Ring isn’t much better. With a recent live demo at Mobile World Congress, IoT security firm Dojo by Bull Guard took advantage of a security exploit that allowed would-be evil doers to access unencrypted audio and video. By accessing the network, they then grabbed the video and audio as it is transmitted from the Ring Doorbell to the server, and then the Ring App.
The attacker however, could go a step further, and actually inject their own footage, pretending to be a family friend, or a babysitter to trick the homeowner into unlocking the door remotely.
The reason for these vulnerabilities lies in the connections of these smart cameras. While a constantly vigilant AI is great for monitoring video footage, that always open internet connection on the Nest and Ring cameras are like security watching the entrance at a bank, but forgetting there’s a back door. AIKEA however, does away with this limitation, by allowing our AI to be run on the edge. It keeps watch, but only calls if it sees something suspicious. And even then, when it makes a call, it does so with a simple text through an encrypted line, not with an unsecured extended video call.
Speaking of back doors though, did we mention that the engineers at Nest and Ring haven’t great at locking them?
Up until now we haven’t had too many problems with our dumb home security cameras. Despite many of us never actually looking at the footage, it only starts to become weird when other people start looking.
By giving their research and development team unrestricted access to all of their customer’s footage. Ring’s engineers were caught watching customers kissing to firing guns, to stealing. All because they figured it would cost more to encrypt the data. In 2012, these decisions could be explained as cut corners by a struggling startup. But now, backed by Amazon and the biggest whale in the smart device industry, is it too much to ask for a little consideration for its customers?
Bringing this one step further, Ring allows your neighbors and the police to view snippets of your doorbell. Going in as so far to have local law enforcement subsidize the costs of installing Ring smart devices in more than a few neighborhoods.
And on top of it all, they charge you for storing your own video footage, on top of their AI service.
AIKEA on the other hand, doesn’t tell us or the popo what it sees, nor anyone else other than you. And best of all, we won’t nickel and dime you for using our smart device.
