Testing the Digital Standard: Smart Pressure Cooker

In 2018, New America’s Open Technology Institute (OTI) launched a project to educate people about the Digital Standard,⁠ a new framework for evaluating the privacy and security of internet-connected consumer products and software. The Standard was developed by a group of organizations, including Ranking Digital Rights, in collaboration with Consumer Reports. Building off this work, we're selecting a few representative products and apps and putting them through the tests that the Digital Standard describes. Our methodology will include exactly how we judged each indicator, including what information was needed in order to measure whether the indicator was met, where we looked for it and where we found it, and how we interpreted the inevitable vagueness and edge cases. Below you'll find information related to the second product in this series: a smart pressure cooker.

The product for our second round of Digital Standard testing is a smart pressure cooker, which is made by a company that produces various other kitchen appliances. The product consists of a physical device, which has various cooking functionalities, and a mobile app that connects with the physical device. The app allows users to conduct actions like set a time for the appliance to begin cooking, select what item to cook from a pre-determined list of options, and monitor the status of the cooking process.

Note: For the purposes of this project, we will not be revealing the manufacturer, service provider, or any other company or product names for the devices we are testing. Our goal is to develop and document a process to implement the Digital Standard, and we feel that publishing specific information about the products we are testing detracts from that process.