IoT Privacy Database

The worst offenders

Ranked by Surveillance Index — a 0–10 composite of what the vendor's policy permits and what independent research proves. Machine grades trace to a cited source, a grade a reviewer adjusted carries the reviewer's published reason, and only Staff Reviewed devices appear here: naming a manufacturer among the worst offenders is too strong a claim to make from a rating no person has reviewed.

1. 9.3

   Clearview AI Face Recognition Face Recognition · Clearview AI

   FF

   Clearview AI is not a device you buy — it is a search engine built out of your face. The company runs automated crawlers that, in the UK Upper Tribunal's words, "scrape" the public-facing internet, assign each face a "facial vector," and store the result in a searchable database the Tribunal described in October 2025 as holding "tens of billions of such mapped images." Police, immigration and national-security agencies then upload a photo of an unknown person and get back other pictures of that person from across the web. Nobody in the database consented, was notified, or can realistically avoid it: if a friend posted a photo of you, you are in it. This is the defining feature of the system — it is involuntary mass surveillance of the general public, and Canada's federal and three provincial privacy commissioners said so in as many words, concluding that "What Clearview does is mass surveillance and it is illegal." Regulators in Canada, Australia and Greece found the practice unlawful and ordered deletion; the UK ICO fined the company £7,552,800 and ordered UK data deleted. Clearview disagreed with the Canadian findings and "did not demonstrate a willingness to follow" the recommendations, and EFF's Atlas of Surveillance still records a US state agency buying the product in FY2023. A US court settlement with the ACLU permanently barred it from making the faceprint database available to most businesses and private entities, and its own public privacy policy concedes it keeps data "as long as the company has a need for its use," enumerates deletion rights only for residents of fourteen named US states, and admits its disclosure of scraped photos "may be deemed a 'sale'" under California law. Meanwhile it keeps expanding — in 2025 court records showed it had tried to buy 690 million arrest records and 390 million arrest photos, including Social Security numbers, to bolt onto the face database.

2. 8.7

   GM / OnStar (Smart Driver) Connected Car · General Motors / OnStar

   FF

   Collected precise geolocation every three seconds and driving behavior like hard braking and speeding, selling it to LexisNexis and Verisk until an FTC 20-year consent order and Texas AG suit ended the practice.

3. 8.6

   Motorola Solutions ALPR ALPR Camera · Motorola Solutions

   FC

   Motorola Solutions sells automated license plate reader (ALPR) cameras — fixed on poles and mounted on patrol cars — that photograph passing vehicles, read the plate, record make, model and colour, and stamp each sighting with a location and time. The images flow into hosted databases (Vigilant LEARN, PlateSearch, VehicleManager) that police agencies search and share with each other. Motorola bought this business on 7 January 2019 for $445 million when it acquired VaaS International Holdings, whose subsidiaries were Vigilant Solutions (law enforcement) and Digital Recognition Network or DRN (commercial); EFF documents that DRN builds its dataset through partnerships with repossession companies and that police can buy subscription access to it. Nobody consents to being scanned: the California State Auditor found that 99.9 percent of the 320 million images the LAPD stores are of vehicles that were not on a hot list, and that audited agencies were sharing images with hundreds — Sacramento with over a thousand — of other entities across the country. EFF's analysis of that audit identifies Vigilant as the cloud provider behind the audited agencies and counts 230 California agencies deploying ALPRs. Motorola's published privacy statement does not cover any of this: it expressly excludes data the company handles in its capacity as a processor, so the drivers being photographed have no policy granting them notice, access or deletion, and the US LPR product page links no notice for them. The system has also leaked. In January 2025, 404 Media reported that researchers found roughly 170 Motorola ReaperHD cameras streaming unencrypted video and plate data onto the open internet. In November 2025, 404 Media reported that an ICE app letting officers scan a plate and pull up a vehicle's nationwide location history is powered by Motorola Solutions and Thomson Reuters.

4. 8.4

   Vigilant Solutions ALPR ALPR Camera · Vigilant Solutions

   FB

   Vigilant Solutions builds automated licence plate reader (ALPR) cameras — fixed on poles and mounted on vehicles — that photograph every passing car, convert the plate to text, and store it with the date, time and GPS location. Unlike almost everything else in this catalogue, the people captured are not customers: drivers never opt in, are never notified, and cannot see, correct or delete their records. Vigilant pools commercially collected scans, gathered through an affiliated subsidiary (DRN), with scans contributed by police departments into a shared national database that agencies query through the LEARN platform. That pool is genuinely enormous and overwhelmingly innocent — EFF found 173 agencies across 23 states logged roughly 2.5 billion scans in 2016–17, of which only 0.5% matched any wanted-vehicle list. The same data is licensed commercially to financial institutions and other permitted-user classes, and ACLU records obtained under FOIA show more than 9,000 ICE agents were given access under a $6.1 million contract, letting immigration agents reconstruct where a car has been. Vigilant's own published policy says it keeps the data "as long as it has commercial value," offers no individual opt-out, and reserves the right to rewrite the policy retroactively. Independent security work has repeatedly found the hardware leaky: in January 2025 researchers found roughly 170 unencrypted ALPR streams pushing live video and plate reads onto the open internet with no password at all. Vigilant is now owned by Motorola Solutions, which acquired VaaS International Holdings for $445 million in January 2019.

5. 8.4

   Vizio SmartCast (Inscape) Smart TV · VIZIO Inc.

   FF

   Captured second-by-second viewing data from 11 million-plus TVs and sold demographically enriched profiles, leading to a landmark 2017 FTC/NJ settlement; its Inscape division still licenses data via iSpot.tv.

6. 8.2

   Hyundai Bluelink Driving Score Connected Car · Hyundai Motor Company

   FF

   Shared mileage, speed, braking and acceleration data from 1.7 million vehicles with Verisk between 2018 and 2024, receiving about 61 cents per car, and now faces a certified class action.

7. 8.1

   We-Vibe Connected Vibrator Intimate Device · Standard Innovation Corporation (We-Vibe)

   FF

   Logged the date, time, vibration intensity and pattern of each use tied to a user's email, transmitting it to Canadian servers before a 2017 class-action settlement forced the company to stop.

8. 7.8

   Hisense Smart TV Smart TV · Hisense

   FF

   Allegedly takes screenshots of the viewer's screen roughly every half second via ACR and sells resulting data for targeted ads, per the Texas AG's December 2025 lawsuit against five TV makers.