In a study published in January 2022, Ademe and Arcep estimate the number of connected objects in France at 244 million, 14.4 billion worldwide. These statistical data cover a wide variety of objects: connected electricity meters, for example, take the lion’s share of this vast set of nearly 60 million connected products in France. Among the questions posed by the generalization of these domestic companions, data security is not the most trivial. On the occasion of World Data Protection Day, January 28, Netatmo, one of the French specialists in the smart home market, offers some advice to protect yourself.
Create a secure password
Password is the most obvious lock to protect your data. For greater security, it must contain letters, numbers, symbols, uppercase and lowercase letters. In the vast majority of cases, users are warned when this password does not meet these requirements and are guided to set a sufficiently secure password.
However, some additional precautions are taken with advantage:
Don’t share your password
In case of warning, change your password or even your username: in the Security tab of the Netatmo apps, you can change your password or log out of all products
Use unique passwords for each of its connected services, centralized in trusted and secure password managers
Be economical with your data
When registering for a service, the user entrusts a certain amount of personal data to his service provider. In Europe, companies are required to comply with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the general logic of which is to minimize data collection, inform the user at all times of its purpose and allow him to consent or not, reversibly, in its detail. Do not hesitate to avail yourself of this right and look carefully at what is meant by personal information that we provide when registering for a new service, to distinguish even those necessary for its correct functioning.
To guarantee respect for the privacy of its users, Netatmo has opted for “privacy by design”. Therefore, right from the design phase of the products and their applications, the company takes care to reduce the amount of personal data collected to the bare minimum.
This is why Netatmo only collects from users the data necessary for the proper functioning of its products. Personal data such as your last name, first name, age or address are not required when creating your Netatmo account.
Update your devices
It is important to ensure that your devices and applications are always up to date. These updates not only enable new features, but also ensure an optimal level of security. For this, it is advisable to visit the manufacturer’s website regularly and check the status of its applications on your smartphone.
Netatmo updates the software of its products regularly and automatically. All Netatmo products, including those already on the market, are affected by these updates. Thanks to these automatic and free security updates, Netatmo offers its users the safest and most advanced technologies.
Get a little technical
Among the questions that are interesting to ask when connecting an object at home, the use of the cloud is undoubtedly one of the first. What happens to the collected information? Where are they stored or sent? How is this transmission encrypted?
Users equipped with an indoor or outdoor security camera are particularly sensitive to the protection of their video data. To ensure privacy, Netatmo cameras store video locally on an included microSD card. Also, the card is encrypted, which provides a higher level of protection for its contents. However, when an unusual event occurs, an image of it is sent to Netatmo’s servers and retrieved from the user’s smartphone. Netatmo then encrypts the communication between its servers, the product and the smartphone. Thus, the information is protected and cannot be read by a hacker.
Finally, the entire life of the house is not permanently recorded. Unlike other security cameras, which record every gesture of everyone they see, without distinction, the Netatmo camera activates recording based on user preferences. Thanks to its facial recognition technology, the camera is able to distinguish between family members and intruders. Thus, users can turn on recording when the camera sees an unfamiliar face and turn it off for loved ones.
They are therefore serene in the privacy of their homes.