

Most of them are written in carefully worded legalese that's crafted more to protect the company than to inform you, the consumer. Simply put, none of these privacy policies make for quick reading. That means that much of what's written might not even be relevant to routers.Īll of the router privacy policies mentioned in this post are thousands of words long, and much of what's in them can be confusing or irrelevant to users. Even worse, many of these policies are written to cover the entire company in question, including all of its products, services and websites, as well as the way it handles data from sales transactions and even job applications. He's not wrong: Most of the privacy policies I reviewed for this post included plenty of the "wiggle cover" Cyphers described, with broad, vague language and relatively few actual specifics.


"That doesn't necessarily mean that the company is doing the worst thing you could imagine, but it means that they have wiggle cover if they choose to do bad stuff with your data." "Often, what you'll see is language that says, 'we collect X, Y and Z data, and we might share it with our business partners, and we may share it for any of these seven different reasons', and all of them are very vague," Cyphers continued. "All a privacy policy can really do is tell you with some confidence that something bad is not going to happen," said Bennett Cyphers, a staff technologist with the privacy-focused Electronic Frontier Foundation, "but it won't tell you if something bad is going to happen."
#Eero router login ip full
I combed through about 30,000 words of terms of use and other policy documents as I tried to find answers for this post - but privacy policies typically aren't written with full transparency in mind. So, I set out to dig into the details of what these routers are doing with your data - here's what I found. Even if you make it that far, you're likely to end up with more questions than answers.įortunately, I have a strong stomach for fine print, and after spending the last few years testing and reviewing routers here on CNET, most manufacturers tend to respond to my emails when I have questions. Working up the will to read through the lengthy legal-speak that fills them is no small task for a single manufacturer, let alone several of them. Data-collection practices are complicated to begin with, and most privacy policies do a poor job of shedding light on them. The problem is that it's next to impossible for the average consumer to glean very much about the privacy practices of the companies that make and sell routers. That's a lot of data - enough so to make privacy a reasonable point of concern when you're picking one out. Your home's Wi-Fi router is the central hub of your home network, which means that all of the traffic from all of the Wi-Fi devices under your roof passes through it on its way to the cloud.
