Digital Experience - Part 3

By Bayle Emlein

Dojo from BullGuard addresses what is probably the biggest barrier to voluntary entry into the Internet of Things: security and privacy.

What if my bathroom scale blabs to my refrigerator? What if the doorbell tells my insurance company what time the teen-agers really came home? What if the neighborhood kids post my ice cream habits to Facebook?

The creative options are legion if not quite endless, and an open invitation to every script kiddie as well as to the more serious snoopers who have premeditated maliciousness in mind. Dojo is a device from BullGuard device secures the notoriously porous web of smart home devices.

A dojo, for those of you who don’t know, is where one practices and perfects Japanese martial arts. The Dojo device secures your personal stuff [that’s a technical term] with an enterprise-grade network security service.

This Dojo is quite elegant: the company refers to the physical device as a “pebble.” I think of it as a pet rock, larger than a pebble but still blending quite well in my shell collection. A discreet glowing band changes color to indicate the level of security, clear enough to see instantly and elegant enough to maintain the decorative motif.

Of course, you can use your phone to alert when you’re away from home or prefer to monitor from remote control mode. As of now, only items within your home (or office, I presume) can be monitored.