Smartwatches designed for kids that are often pitched to parents as safety devices are highly vulnerable to hacking.

That’s according to research published Wednesday by the Norwegian Consumer Council in conjunction with security firm Mnemonic AS. They found serious security and privacy flaws in smartwatches for children that could allow strangers to seize control of the watches easily and use them to track and eavesdrop on children — defeating the very purpose for which many parents buy the smartwatch.

The security flaws were discovered in four different brands of smartwatches: the Gator 2, Tinitell, Viksfjord and Xplora watches. They included poor implementation of security protocols with the SOS function in the Gator watch and the whitelisted phone numbers function in the Viksfjord

Data shared by the watches was found to lack encryption, allowing anyone to eavesdrop on the data being shared. The alert feature in the watches, which lets parents know when their child leaves a permitted areas, was also described as being “unreliable.” That means an attacker who wished to abduct a child could tamper with the feature, essentially giving parents a false sense of security.

On the privacy front, the apps associated with the watches lacked terms and conditions, and also made it impossible for data or a user account to be deleted, both breaches of Norwegian and European Union privacy laws.

“It’s very serious when products that claim to make children safer instead put them at risk because of poor security and features that do not work properly,” Finn Myrstad, director of digital policy at the Norwegian Consumer Council, said in a statement.

At least some of the watches listed in the report are sold globally, with SiliconANGLE finding the Gator 2 and Tinitell watches both being listed for sale on Amazon.com in the United States. In the U.K., the BBC reported, one retailer, John Lewis Partnership PLC, has withdrawn from sale one of the watches because of the safety concerns.

The NCC recommended that parents refrain from buying these smartwatches for their child “until features and security standards are satisfactory,” and that those who have already purchased the watches should seek to return them.

Photo: NCC