At the beginning of this year, technology journalist Kashmir Hill converted her one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco into a “smart home”. She connected every possible appliance in her house, including her bed, to the internet in order to see how much data was being sent to the manufacturers of the device.
Kashmir (which has to be the coolest female first name ever) wanted to test the “smart home” concept and find out whether her home would “betray” her.
“The reason I smartened up my house was to find out whether it would betray me.”
Smart devices are becoming more and more popular with consumers, from smart speakers that act as personal assistants, to toothbrushes, sex toys and even your bathroom mirror can be smart these days. It’s big business too, with the value of the smart device market expected to reach $27 billion by 2021.
She monitored exactly what data was being sent from her home using a specially built router, that would send the information to a work colleague.
“Using a Raspberry Pi computer, I built a router with a Wi-Fi network called “iotea” (I’m not very good at naming things) to which Kashmir connected all of her devices, so that I could capture the smart home’s network activity. In other words, I could see every time the devices were talking to servers outside the home.”
This gave them the same view as your Internet Service Provider (ISP) might have, and the results were worrying. They could see everything you do, and that’s more than just your browsing habits. Data from your smart TV, coffee machine or even sex toy could be viewed by your ISP, and if you live in the US, that data can now be sold on.
The other revelation from this little experiment was that smart homes are far from convenient. Kashmir points out that in her older apartment, there just weren’t enough power outlets to cater to the devices hunger for electricity, so she had extensions cords and outlets spread throughout her home. Then there was just the sheer number of apps needed to run all these devices, each requiring a separate account and a list of terms and conditions so long, no-one will be reading them.
She was also hoping to be able to user her Amazon Echo speaker to control everything, but things didn’t exactly go as they had planned.
“The first night I said, “Alexa, turn on the Christmas lights,” they all turned on in sparkly synchronicity and it was magical. But one day, Alexa stopped recognizing “Christmas lights” as a group, and I could not figure out how to fix it, so I had to ask Alexa each night to turn off the lights one-by-one.”
This turned out to be more time-consuming and irritating than flipping a switch. This is another problem, when you have so many devices from so many different manufacturers and providers, they don’t always play together so well. The idea of these smart devices is to make life more convenient, to make things quicker but with the amount of setup, maintenance and constant bug fixing starts to get the better of even the most enthusiastic tech lover. You also need a hefty router in my opinion to really handle all of these connected devices, with the ones provided for free by most ISPs not being able to handle such heavy loads.
I love technology, the internet and the way these miraculous things can make our lives easier, but the current generation of smart devices are little more than gimmicks. I don’t need my fridge to tell me when I’m low on milk, I don’t need a coffee machine to brew a pot before I’ve even gotten out of bed and I definitely don’t need my information being passed around from pillar to post by greedy corporations with nothing but profit on their collective minds.
I’m a big supporter of the DIY computer movement that was really given some life with the introduction of the Raspberry Pi mini computer. I’ve built a small motion-detecting Pi-powered camera for the front of the house (people round here are animals), I’ve built a couple of media servers/players and I have many more plans for these tiny devices but none of them include my household appliances. By building these things yourself, you not only learn more but you are then familiar with exactly what they can and will do, and you have full control over your data. Use an older router to spin up your own internal network that isn’t connected to the internet. The possibilities truly are endless here. These mass-produced consumer-grade devices are just as buggy and unreliable, if not more so, than a Pi-powered equivalent you build yourself. The difference is, at least you have a chance of repairing or upgrading the one you built yourself.
What are your thoughts on this topic? Do you have any smart home devices? Let me know your thoughts and feelings in the comment section down below, and as always make sure to follow me for the latest Cryptocurrency, Internet and Pop Culture updates. Until we meet again, Peace!
Sources:
The House That Spied on Me for Gizmodo (https://gizmodo.com/the-house-that-spied-on-me-1822429852)
Illustration: Harry Campbell for Gizmodo/GMG
Smart Home Graphic from pixabay (https://pixabay.com/en/smart-home-home-technology-2005993/)