Both issues you raise are already kind of solved(or very close to it) in the corporate security world. Also, I think people will lie and cheat when we make it e

Both issues you raise are already kind of solved(or very close to it) in the corporate security world. Also, I think people will lie and cheat when we make it easy for them to get away with it. Sending all data their way into their closed "black box systems" and trusting they don't use it for nefarious things makes is extremely easy for them to do whatever they want. Having devices run mostly at the edge communicating sporadically with the mothership or other web services it takes much more effort to conceal private information gathering and many companies will think it is not worth the risk of getting caught Also, no matter how cleverly they conceal it, someone will be able to reverse engineer it. When all we send is camera/microphone/sensor data this is 100% not possible. About your specific points. Yes, MiTM would be required today although under a nicer name. In "corporate security" context this is often called "SSL inspection" and various hacks to end devices are required to make it work well. In future I hope no hacks will be required for home devices and enabling it will be a matter of a simple setting. Then a router/appliance could be used as SSL traffic decrypting proxy. One way it could be done, a customer could push a button on a device for it to download a self signed certificate from the router/scanning appliance. Then it would trust that cert in place of the target while the router would handle the ssl between itself and the remote service. Then you raise a point of traffic scanning. It is not a trivial problem, but much of the technology already exists in various (again corpo) security scanning products. From signature based, through heuristics, to perhaps future AI based methods it is possible to achieve some level of protection from information leakage if you are able to scan all outgoing traffic and devices that communicate are generally built supporting well defined protocols. When AI runs at the edge at least we have a fighting chance to succeed most of the time. When it runs in the cloud and we just stream camera/microphone/sensor data there is no hope.