Sexual Intimacy in the Age of Smart Devices

Wynn, Matthew; Tillotson, Kyle; Kao, Ryan; Calderón, A V Sergio; Murillo, Andrés; Camargo, Javier; Mantilla, Rafael; Rangel, Brahian; Cárdenas, Álvaro A.; Rueda, Sandra

doi:10.1145/3139937.3139942

Cited by 21 publications

(11 citation statements)

References 2 publications

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“…constitute consent." To make certain that this standard of explicit consent is met, companies selling networked sex toys need to be clear about what data they will be processing and for what purpose (Wynn et al, 2017).…”

Section: Consent and Leaking Sexual Secretsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Play, secrecy and consent: Theorizing privacy breaches and sensitive data in the world of networked sex toys

Sundén

2020

Sexualities

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Based on a new materialist analysis of “vibrant matter” to understand the liveliness of sexual objects in toy-based sexual play, in this article I investigate the politics of thinking digital technologies as operating partly beyond human forms of agency and control. I use as my core examples privacy breaches and data leaks in the world of networked sex toys – such as a vibrator which allegedly audio recorded its clients’ play sessions without express permission – to engage with questions of intimacy and privacy in digital networks of humans and nonhumans. In particular, the discussion focuses on the consequences of new forms of publicness for how we can understand sexual intimacy and sexual play. What does it mean to have an intimate moment when connected to a device, a medium and a network that is by definition public, corporate and leaky? And how could we imagine other ways of being sexually intimate and exposed – yet safe – in public digital networks? Drawing on discussions of queer intimacy, sexual consent and queer BDSM, I suggest that current understandings of privacy and sensitive data (as per GDPR) may need unconventional sources to further ways of knowing what consent might mean, and how it feels.

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Section: Consent and Leaking Sexual Secretsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Play, secrecy and consent: Theorizing privacy breaches and sensitive data in the world of networked sex toys

Sundén

2020

Sexualities

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…As far as we are aware, we were the first researchers to discuss the potential of remote sexual assault, and showed practical attacks demonstrating this threat on commercially available products (we refer the readers to our initial work [3]).…”

Section: Intimate Devicesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…A trusted partner can remotely control the vibease device through an app. However, the vulnerabilities we found (see [3] for more details) give an attacker the ability to impersonate a trusted partner and then send specific control requests. The main problem is that the vibease Android app (and iOS app) exchanges xmpp messages-for sending remote commands and chat communication-with other apps without using encryption.…”

Section: Intimate Devicesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The network traffic between the OhMiBod app (for both Android and iOS) happens via TLS. So, we used SSLsplit as a proxy to inspect the TLS traffic (we refer the readers to [3] for implementation details). This revealed API calls for various functionalities: editing user profile, searching for users, requesting control, and chatting with another trusted user.…”

Section: Intimate Devicesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…These vulnerabilities give the attacker the ability to (1) hijack a drone (stealing it, crashing it, or even harming a person with it), (2) turn on a nearby drone and ask it to stream video and microphone data to spy on a neighbor, (3) take control of a children's toy to insult the child or to have inappropriate conversations with the child, using the trusted voice of the toy, (4) take control of the toy to spy on the household, (5) interact with a stolen/or resold toy to extract sensitive information the child once shared with their toy, (6) take control of Internet-connected cameras to spy on a household, (7) identify the existence of sensitive devices (e.g., vibrators) nearby and obtain private information of a person's intimate decisions, and (8) impersonate a trusted partner and allow an attacker to commit remote sexual assault. We also created videos to illustrate and clarify some of these attacks, including the voice attacks on the dino 1 , a takeover attack on the drone 2 , and attacks on intimate devices 3 .…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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