Palm d’Oor

It’s CES 2024, and what that means is a whole lot of residential and public-facing security products being introduced with the new year.

I think if I had to pick what stands out the most in the crowd it’s the continued line of smart home products we see evolving and branching out. Not all of these are security-focused products, but most of them are security adjacent. Also, really, if we’ve learned anything in these past few years it’s that if your device is smart, you’d be dumb not to secure it.

Or you can have your credit card data stolen by hackers who got in through your Roomba. Has that been done yet? Probably. One product that’s absolutely security focused is another palm scanner from the Phillips Home Access Smart Lock product line. The Phillips Wi-Fi Palm Recognition Smart Deadbolt promises what it calls a paradigm shift in home security owing to its “State-of-the-art” palm vein reader.

Huh, feel like I’ve heard that one somewhere before…recently. It also promised effortless unlocking of doors for family members of all ages. I would say probably don’t scan in the print for wandering toddlers, it’s hard enough already to keep them out of places.

When Amazon One Enterprise Services launched its palm vein reader late last year, the company promised that no data would be stored on the device, and biometric data would be encrypted, among other security procedures. I hope that as these technologies become more prevalent in the residential sphere that the same care is taken to secure them.

Otherwise, we’ll have an all-new brand of identity theft become commonplace, the kind that can easily open doors in our home and access our financial accounts. We might have to invent all new terminology for it as well. Maybe they’ll call it…

Armed robbery.

No? Might have been beaten to the punch on that one.