XDA: Google temporarily kills Mi Home integration with Assistant following creepy Xiaomi security camera bug

jeudi 2 janvier 2020

Google temporarily kills Mi Home integration with Assistant following creepy Xiaomi security camera bug

The advent of smartphones has also brought us smart, well, everything. Smart light bulbs, smart cameras for your home, and of course, hubs so you can access your voice assistant of choice anywhere in your home and interact with all of these things. But of course, one big concern remains, and that is the privacy factor. After all, not everyone feels comfortable having an Internet-connected, always-on camera watching you while you sleep or while you’re at home. These concerns may very well get bigger with one creepy incident that happened today with a Google Nest Hub and a Xiaomi Mijia smart security cam.

A Reddit user who owns a Google Nest Hub and a number of Xiaomi cameras around their home asked the Google Assistant to display one of their cameras’ feeds, only to get creepy stills of other people’s homes, including a baby sleeping and an old man sleeping in a chair. Further contributing to this creepy factor is the fact that all stills are distorted and black and white as if we were watching a horror film. Given it’s real and it’s a widespread issue, this represents a massive security vulnerability, as it means that your own home’s feed could be displayed by a random person anywhere around the world.

In order to stop this issue from happening for now and to investigate it better, Google has temporarily killed Google Assistant integration for Mi Home smart home products, including light bulbs, cameras, and more. We tried to connect to a Xiaomi Smart Light bulb through both a Google Home Mini and the Google Assistant app and we were unsuccessful for both, confirming that, in fact, the Google Assistant can’t connect to any Mi Home products right now. A Google spokesperson also stated to Android Authority that they were “aware of the issue and are in contact with Xiaomi to work on a fix. In the meantime, we’re disabling Xiaomi integrations on our devices.”