It seems to be. It can use up to 500mb/month of data, and is more than just for tracking something with tiny payloads of anonymized data.
But it doesn’t seem to be sharing your internet like a lot of people seem to claim. I guess the fear is that there’s some security vulnerability that makes that more possible?
If (it's not) it were true it wouldn't have to be sent in clear text or even at once though. There's tons of ways they theoretically could send data that wouldn't be obvious from looking at network traffic.
That's assuming it's not encrypted. A lot of the data coming in is transmitted in plain right now, (comms, images, telemetry, ...) because it's just not worth encrypting, or simply could be of interest to other parties. But if anyone wants to put encryption on the data, you're not going to find out much.
That said... it's passing right over me in a few minutes, so I'll be out monitoring the 4xx freqs :)
Edit: in case anyone was wondering - nothing exciting happened. No sign of new signals during a perfect pass: https://i.imgur.com/rMC6gIE.png (at least not at those freqs they used previously)
Depending on how often I use it and the audio formats, it could be. Maybe not for someone with a 300GB/mo cap, but I'm stuck with 15, so every megabyte counts. Either way, my point is that there's no reason for it to use any data at all to control devices on my own local network.
It would be even better if that data was not collected to begin with. Alternatively, that this data would not leave the local hardware. But no.. everything has to be connected.
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