EU Orders Recall of Children's Smartwatch Over Severe Privacy Concerns

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: For the first time, EU authorities have announced plans to recall a product from the European market because of a data privacy issue. The product is Safe-KID-One, a children's smartwatch produced by German electronics vendor ENOX. According to the company's website, the watch comes with a trove of features, such as a built-in GPS tracker, built-in microphone and speaker, a calling and SMS text function, and a companion Android mobile app that parents can use to keep track and contact their children. The product is what most parents regularly look in a modern smartwatch but in a RAPEX (Rapid Alert System for Non-Food Products) alert published last week and spotted by Dutch news site Tweakers, European authorities ordered a mass recall of all smartwatches from end users citing severe privacy lapses. 'The mobile application accompanying the watch has unencrypted communications with its backend server and the server enables unauthenticated access to data,' said authorities in the RAPEX alert. 'As a consequence, the data such as location history, phone numbers, serial number can easily be retrieved and changed.' On top of this, authorities also said that 'a malicious user can send commands to any watch making it call another number of his choosing, can communicate with the child wearing the device or locate the child through GPS.'

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