Sinotrack and the NewGPS2012 platform didn’t respond to WIRED’s requests for comment, and the researchers say their hacking techniques against those systems still appear to work. For more than a decade, cybersecurity experts and privacy advocates have warned that cheap, GPS-enabled children’s smartwatches and aftermarket vehicle accessories are riddled with security vulnerabilities that leave kids and drivers susceptible to hacking and tracking. But the sheer number of different brands and models of those devices has often made identifying the truly insecure gadgets feel nearly impossible for consumers. More than any specific vulnerability, Solferini and Stykas say, they wanted to highlight that much of that daunting diversity among GPS devices—along with consumers’ sense of choice among them—is essentially an illusion. “A parent in Sweden buying a ‘SafeKid’ watch and a parent in Spain buying a ‘SaveFamily’ watch are both sending their child’s location data to the same vulnerable myaqsh.com backend on Alibaba Cloud in mainland China, without knowing it,” they write in a whitepaper shared with WIRED ahead of their Black Hat presentation, referring to the …