Scout Is a Raspberry Pi-Based Router That Protects Your Smart Home Privacy

There’s no denying the convenience of IoT (Internet of Things) and smart home devices. Any product that can make people’s lives easier is going to be popular, after all. But consumers are sacrificing their privacy by utilizing many smart home devices and services. Your Amazon Echo, for example, makes it easy to turn off a light or order cat food with a simple voice command, but constantly collects data about you and your habits along the way. Scout is a “smart home counterspy agent” that visualizes those services’ data usage, and allows you to protect your privacy.

Scout is able to do that by acting as a WiFi router, just like you already use at home to network all of your connected devices and get them online. Instead of connecting those through a traditional router, however, you’d connect them through Scout. Doing so allows Scout to monitor all of the communications originating from your home. For instance, if your IoT smart plug is sending data to an outside server somewhere, Scout will be able to trace that.

In order for you to keep track of those communications, Scout displays a visualization of each data packet on a screen on the front of the device. The visualizations show the kind of data — encrypted or unencrypted, which device or service is sending them, and where they’re being sent to. If you don’t like what you’re seeing, you can push a button that will automatically send a request for information to the device manufacturer, which they’re legally obligated to answer. Scout is just a prototype built on a Raspberry Pi 3 for now, but the technology could easily be integrated into commercial routers.