Kids' Smartwatches Are a Security Nightmare Despite Years of Warnings

In a paper published late last month, researchers at the Münster University of Applied Sciences in Germany detailed their testing of the security of six brands of smartwatches marketed for kids. They're designed to send and receive voice and text messages, and let parents track their child's location from a smartphone app. The researchers found that hackers could abuse those features to track a target child's location using the watch's GPS in five out of the six brands of watch they tested. Several of the watches had even more severe vulnerabilities, allowing hackers to send voice and text messages to children that appear to come from their parents, to intercept communications between parents and children, and even to record audio from a child's surroundings and eavesdrop on them.