President-elect Joe Biden will move into the White House on Wednesday, but his Peloton exercise bike might not be coming along.
Biden starts every day before 8 a.m. exercising in his home gym in Delaware, walking on a treadmill, lifting small weights and using his Peloton, a $1,900 machine, The New York Times reported last year. But the Peloton comes with access to the internet, a microphone and a camera so that users can hook into online live classes.
That connectivity may be seen by the Secret Service as a security threat, according to a Popular Mechanics report. Nearly anything connected to the internet can be hacked without extensive protection.
To win approval to move the exercise bike into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Biden may have to tear out the bike’s mic, camera and networking equipment, Max Kilger, director of the University of Texas at San Antonio’s data analytics program, told the magazine.
“Because you’re connected to the Internet, even though there are firewalls and intrusion detection software … those things can be gotten around if you’re really good and skilled,” Kilger said. “If you really want that Peloton to be secure, you yank out the camera, you yank out the microphone, and you yank out the networking equipment … and you basically have a boring bike. You lose the shiny object and the attractiveness.”
Peloton takes privacy seriously. The company says the “microphone on all Peloton devices is OFF by default and is only active with explicit user action.”
“At Peloton, we consider the security of our systems and the best interest of our members a top priority,” the company says on its security page. “However, no matter how much effort we put into system security, there can still be vulnerabilities present. Because of this we are looking to the security community to help us meet this top priority through programs like responsible disclosure.”
The connectivity “allows the bike to communicate with your Apple Watch or Fitbit, which are internet-of-things (IoT) devices that contain microphones,” Yahoo reports. “If a hacker found a way to infect Biden’s Peloton, then it’s theoretically possible they could hop from the bike to the watch and vice versa, Kilger explains. If either device is compromised in this scenario, a bad actor could access the network on which each device runs.”
So the simplest step is to simply disable that connectivity.
“The Secret Service and the White House have strategies to work around issues like this — presumably, ways to equip the bike (albeit without some of its key features) so it’s less connected but still functional,” Esquire reported. “Biden just might not be allowed to interact with his fellow riders anymore. That’s another hill he’s going to have to push through.”
It wouldn’t be the first time a modified Peloton came into the White House. “One person close to the company told me that Michelle Obama has a Peloton, but it’s been modified, without a camera or microphone. Peloton declined to comment on this at all, as did the press office of Michelle Obama,” The Verge wrote in 2017.