Your Holiday Shopping Guide to Putting Privacy Under the Tree

As the holidays draw nearer and the shopping season goes full steam ahead, consumers all around the world are looking for just the right presents to finish out their lists. The presents may range in price and meaningful sentiment, of course, but with the technology sector taking up a significant share of the market, safeguarding your privacy becomes the real gift.

There’s no doubt that the more connected your devices become, the more vulnerabilities you may face. With every new piece of technology that connects to your network—along with all the apps, software, cloud-based accounts, and other tools to power these devices—there’s another possible door left wide open to hackers and identity thieves.

Fortunately, researchers at Mozilla (the creators of the Firefox web browser) have updated their holiday shopping guide that ranks all kinds of consumer goods based on their potential impact on your privacy. Titled *Privacy Not Included, this guide helps you understand the possible dangers as well as how to secure them. In some cases, it may even help you decide that a specific item is not for you or your family.

The guide is broken up into different categories—toys & games, smart home, entertainment, wearables, health & exercise, and pets—and includes reviews of more than seventy products.

One of the most important aspects to these reviews is the “minimum” requirements for protecting your privacy. According to the researchers, only 32 of the reviewed products even earned a “merit badge” for meeting those minimum standards, meaning the items must “use encryption; have automatic security updates; manage security vulnerabilities using tools like bug bounty programs and clear points of contact; and require users to change the default password if a password is required.”

However, Mozilla’s team also said other factors prevented them from deciding once and for all if many of the products meet the standards, such as the manufacturer not responding to direct requests for information about customers’ privacy.

This is the second year that Mozilla has conducted this review and released the results, but this year the company has included a new tool called the Creep-O-Meter. It will give consumers an idea of the level of privacy concern surrounding different products, ideally before they buy and install them.

There are a lot of holiday shopping guides and consumer review websites that can help you make an informed decision about price, quality, age-appropriateness, and more. This might be the only guide that explicitly supports your privacy, though, so check it out before bringing any new connected devices into your life.

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