August Smart Locks

Smart locks are one of those connected devices that seem to worry lots of people. The pros: They offer a lot of convenience with multiple ways to unlock the door to your home, a way to track who comes and goes from your home, they can allow you give out a keypad number to people like a babysitter and then revoke that when they no longer need access, and they can help you make sure you locked your front door when your anxiety kicks in on vacation. The cons: They can be vulnerable to any number of things such as power outages, lost or compromised phones, ransomware attacks on the company who made your lock, product security vulnerabilities, WiFi and/or Bluetooth vulnerabilities, home hub vulnerabilities, bad software updates, data leaks, and more.

With all that said, how do August Smart Locks stack up? On the security side, in 2019, security researchers found a vulnerability in a version of August's smart locks that use the Connect add-on to connect to WiFi that could let hackers take over your home WiFi. The versions of August smart locks with WiFi built-in didn't seem to be vulnerable to this security threat.

On the privacy side of things, August seems to do better. August doesn't sell your personal information, which is good. They also say they will only use your personal information to send you relevant content where they have your consent to do so. This is also good. All in all, August seems to do a good job with users’ privacy. Just be careful with what you share with third parties such as Alexa or Google Assistant as they can collect data on you too.

What’s the worst that could happen? Well, it’s entirely possible August could suffer a ransomware attack where bad people hold all smart lock access hostage unless August pays up. You can’t get into your home, your pup really has to pee, and things go south from there. You and your pup really don’t want that.