An elf on the shelf watching you might be the least of your concerns this holiday season.
With the increasing prevalence of smart-home tech, it's easy to get caught up in the novelty of it all. You can start your coffee maker from your phone! You can ask your speaker to order groceries! You can build a do-it-yourself surveillance state in your own home and record every corner of your house with wall-mounted cameras - and watch them on your phone!
You might be rushing to the shelves to get your loved ones one of these futuristic gadgets, but not surprisingly, it turns out internet-based tech isn't always so safe. In fact, it's often quite the opposite - internet-of-things gadgets leave you vulnerable to digital attacks.
Mozilla, the creator of the popular web browser Firefox, created a 2018 holiday tech gift guide ranked solely by how creepy certain items are. Mozilla's team broke down each gadget's level of security - including whether it uses encryption, if it shares information with third parties, whether it can spy on you, and if its privacy policy is easily-understandable.
Then, Mozilla asked users to rank each item on a scale of "not creepy" to "super creepy," and asked whether they were likely to buy the product. The results range from gadgets like game consoles, which users didn't think were very creepy and felt likely to buy, to a shady baby monitor with a default password of "123" that users thought was "super creepy" and weren't likely to buy.
Mozilla
In no particular order, here are the top-10 creepiest internet-based gadgets on sale for the holiday season that you might want to avoid: