This article was published on November 5, 2015

Meet Luma, the router that’s sure to make your kids hate you


Meet Luma, the router that’s sure to make your kids hate you

For all intents and purposes, Luma seems to do everything a normal router does. It offers easy setup, dual-band connectivity and even comes in three packs to allow you to set up access points that form a single network throughout your home

That’s where Luma’s normalcy ends. What comes next is sure to cause problems.

On a typical router you can track the time spent on certain websites, limit access to explicit content for children and even block specific IPs to keep your 10-year-old from accessing content that they shouldn’t see, like The Teletubbies.

You can’t systematically spy on your entire household and its guests.

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Luma brings network monitoring out of the shadows and right into the forefront by tracking everyone’s activity and snapping screengrabs periodically before dumping them into in an Instagram-like interface for storage. This data is stored for a year and remains easily accessible to anyone with an administrator account.

If you are administrator, you can hide activity from other users but any other admin can come in behind you and unhide it later, which could lead to some awkward conversations.

All things considered, Luma seems to be a solid router with some impressive features but they might have taken the activity monitoring a touch too far.

Luma

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