Chatter at home

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I’ve always been curious about what my IoT devices do while I’m away from home or sleeping. I mean, they’re behaving, slightly bored, waiting patiently for my next order, right?

Low and behold, Princeton IoT Inspector looks the exact tool. It worked on my Macbook Pro (before upgrading to Mac OS Catalina) and on a Raspberry Pi running Ubuntu Mate.

Monitored were a few of my devices:

  • 2 Google Home Minis
  • Sensibo (controls the air-conditioning in the main room)
  • Synology Media Server and NAS storage device
  • Apple TV
  • iPad Mini (barely used)
  • Motorola G6 Phone (barely used—Google-Fi phone to keep my US phone number and receive texts)
  • Star Labs Laptop (barely relevant)

Results

Overall, everything seems to be normal. Devices phone home to Google, Sensibo, Apple, etc. Several requests ask for web assets on CDNs for libraries: gstatic.com, googleapis.com.

See a list of all device's communication endpoints.

The only exception is the Motorola G6 Phone which seems to reach out to a slew of fishy-looking domains. Even though I haven’t installed Facebook, it pings facebook.com, though not frequently.

See with whom the Motorola G6 likes to chat chat.

Some dubious domains:

  • youzanyun.com
  • app-measurement.com
  • casalemedia.com
  • s3xified.com
  • 4ormat.com
  • qq.com
  • izatcloud.com
  • dotphoto.com