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The House That Spied on Me

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mountaineer:
The House That Spied on Me
Kashmir Hill and Surya Mattu
Wednesday 1:25pm

In December, I converted my one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco into a “smart home.” I connected as many of my appliances and belongings as I could to the internet: an Amazon Echo, my lights, my coffee maker, my baby monitor, my kid’s toys, my vacuum, my TV, my toothbrush, a photo frame, a sex toy, and even my bed.

“Our bed?” asked my husband, aghast. “What can it tell us?”  ...

Thanks to the Internet of Things, I could live in my very own tech-mediated Downton Abbey. That’s the appeal of smart homes for most people, and why they are supposed to be a $27 billion market by 2021. But that wasn’t my primary motivation. The reason I smartened up my house was to find out whether it would betray me.

I installed internet-connected devices to serve me, but by making the otherwise inanimate objects of my home “smart” and giving them internet-connected “brains,” I was also giving them the ability to gather information about my home and the people in it.  ...  Full story at Gizmodo

roamer_1:
I got nothing.
Heck, I'm still fighting like hell to stay away from smart phones and texting... a cell phone at all, even.
The idea of active mikes or cams on my person or in my home is just downright creepy.

Even the SmartTV - I busted that sombich on purpose, right off the bat... The amount of traffic it required, even when dormant, just left me uneasy. At least the ROKU is off (no longer on network DHCP) when the TV is off. And the computers I use rather than the SMART side of the SmartTV  remain wholly in my control. Mo bedda.



I can't imagine the need for IoT gadgetry in the house. Coffee makers, tooth brushes, beds, sex toys? Any supposed convenience is completely offset by privacy issues.

The only real convenience I can see out of any of it would be for clocks to be able to access time servers... That would be legit, if that was all they could access, and nothing else. But then, If people didn't screw around with time twice a year, that'd hardly be necessary either.


Good article though. It is interesting to me that the frustration level was the main complaint - considering that convenience seems to be what sells IoT. No doubt ubiquity will resolve a lot of those issues eventually, but I think I'll stick with manually operating my home.

The morning ritual of making coffee as an instance, is a comfort to me... to the point of going back to a stove top percolator next time around. IMHO, the magic is in that ritual, not in the automation thereof.

Suppressed:

--- Quote ---The Eight Sleep tracker sent its data through a nonstandard port that I wasn’t monitoring, so I wasn’t able track what was happening in the bedroom.
--- End quote ---

Sure, Surya, sure!

Fishrrman:
No IoT "smart house" here.
I've still got knob-and-tube wiring!

Don't own a smartphone.
I don't even answer the "dumb" phone!

mountaineer:
Ditto, @Fishrrman ! We're not fans of technology,  either.

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