Hacking Smartwatch - Free Software & Digital Privacy | A Live Demonstration | FSFTN
This demonstration is recorded at a FOSS event in Chennai. A decade long Free Software and Digital privacy rights hacktivist, Prasanna, from FSFTN emphasizes the core tenets of the Free Software Movement & the need to extend our activism towards the changing digital landscape where real-time tracking & surveillance has become a defining characteristics of Digital Economy (a.k.a. Surveillance Capitalism).
Smartwatches requires a vendor specific Android/ios apps to be usable. These apps are proprietary and what's more worrying is, they push all our personal health data, sleep pattern, etc., to their servers and there is no option to stop it.
Gadgetbridge (https://gadgetbridge.org) is an alternative Android app for such vendor specific apps and it needs more contributors to add support for new watches & to improve the UI/UX of it.
Many of these smart wearables are both easy and difficult to hack. For example, Prasanna was able to fetch watch related info and push a fake call alert to Amazfit smartwatch by simply connecting to it over bluetooth.
The project named "pyAmazfit" uses python to do this and the source code can be found at https://gitlab.com/prashere/pyamazfit
Thanks to the ChennaiFOSS organizers.
Video Recording: Mohammed Aman from CuddaloreGLUG.