Security News > 2020 > October > Creepy covert camera “feature” found in popular smartwatch for kids
Getting your first watch after learning to tell the time is still a delightful childhood rite of passage, at least in countries where watches are affordable.
The irony of buying a watch to improve your child's safety only to find that it simultaneously reduces their security is not lost on the researchers who wrote up the findings we'll be covering here.
With a root-level command prompt, the researchers were able to explore the operating system and Android apps on the watch, and quickly discovered an package called Persistent Connection Service.
With no visible or audible feedback, the watch snapped a covert picture with its built-in camera and uploaded the image to the vendor's cloud servers without waiting for any sort of approval.
This issue the testers identified was based on a remote snapshot feature included in initial internal prototype watches for a potential feature that could be activated by parents after a child pushes an SOS emergency button.