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Several recent stories in the news have focused on terrifying vulnerabilities in specific pieces of internet-connected technology. These aren’t just the regular “my lawnmower knows my Facebook password!” sort of alarm bells, but specifically insightful pieces of information that can be mined by any passing interested hacker. Modern technology has become such a part of our lives that a well-placed hacker could look through an Apple Watch to see a target’s heart beating — or watch the feed from their cloud-connected baby monitor.

The hackable baby monitor example raised a few eyebrows this week, as new research showed that despite being meant to watch over the most precious thing in any home, they were still incredibly easy to hack. Hackers had previously posted a site featuring hundreds of live baby monitor feeds, ostensibly to raise awareness about how incredibly open they were, on average — you know things are bad, when hackers are your main source of anti-hacking intelligence.

Source of cuteness, or DANGER?

But, the ability to view a real-time feed of our children is just the beginning. In recent months, we’ve learned how several models of drug pump can be hacked — actually giving infiltrators the ability to change the dosage delivered to patients. A pair of researchers recently managed to drive a Wired reporter off the road using a zero-day exploit that could extend to several popular models of automobile. A simple, connected fridge can be an inroad to man in the middle attacks that completely defeat your attempts at privacy.

More and more information is becoming available to machines, and when those machines go online that means that information is fundamentally available to hackers, too. People rightly freaked when they found out that the newest version of Kinect was planned to be always on, watching them with its incredibly high-fidelity sensors. Now, personal helper robots like Jibo, which are designed to do nothing but watch and listen for important information, are a hotly anticipated item. It’s all about how you market it, I suppose.

Remember that episode of Homeland where the vice president gets assassinated by hack-induced heart-hack? While the login-and-kill functionality is predictably not real, remote heart-stopping is absolutely not out of the question. And the way we’re headed, it seems reasonably we might arrive at just such an easy-access logins for quick use by doctors and teenage Slovakian shut-ins.

At this point, we should be able to ask government for some sort of standardization or certification for digital security, but the surveillance state has gone and screwed that up, too. The insistence of groups like US Homeland Security on inserting zero-day vulnerabilities into important software means that it can’t be trusted to exert any control over the security industry. That leaves each manufacturer of connected technology to figure things out for themselves, often poorly.

If you buy a cheap, connected fridge, it doesn’t connect to an equally expendable version of your Facebook account; by cheaping out on just one entrance to your personal online castle, you’ve unavoidably made the whole thing vulnerable. Go ahead and load up Silent Circle for that super-important private voice call — it won’t matter a bit, if an attacker is listening through your thermostat.