Since its initial unveiling as part of CES 2024, the Rabbit R1 has gotten a fair share of unfavourable press. Previously, a reverse engineering community dedicated to the device, Rabbitude, claimed that the dedicated virtual assistant device had privacy issues pertaining to the retention and subsequent accessibility of sensitive information. More recently, the company released an update for the device that added a way for said data to be wiped – via a factory reset.
According to a post on the company’s site, in addition to having the ability to wipe all stored data on the Rabbit R1, the update also made it so that the device stored less data to start with. As per prior reports of logged data being accessible via API keys, the update also makes it so that pairing data can no longer be used to read data, and only be used to trigger actions. Said pairing data will also no longer be logged to the device.
Most of these additions are probably more than welcome in the eyes of the privacy-conscious. But the most baffling addition to the Rabbit R1 update has to be the factory reset function, one that is so basic that it’s just about expected on every smart device of today. Though in a more twisted way, this probably falls in line with the device subverting expectations as to what a smart device is in this day and age.
On a related note, addressing the aformentioned report on the Rabbit R1 API keys getting leaked, the company says that they were leaked by an employee to a “self-described ‘hacktivist’ group”. In addition to saying that the said employee “has been terminated and remains under investigation”, the company also says that it has started migrating its secrets elsewhere.
(Source: Rabbit [1], [2])
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