Monday, February 19, 2018

Living in a smart house

We joke that our house is haunted.

There is a light in our dining room hutch that turns on sporadically, and we teasingly say that the hutch is possessed and that the ghost wants attention. We are all fine with this joke, because the hutch ghost is quiet and limits itself to turning the cabinet light on so we can see our china better. If the hutch ghost ever has a tantrum and starts throwing our china at us, I'll be sure to let you know.

But, it has occurred to me that our home is haunted in another way: With smart devices that are constantly recording our data.

As mentioned before, we have an Echo and now we have smart lights. And, of course, we use services like Netflix and Hulu. We have a robo-vaccuum as well, but I honestly think it isn't smart enough to send our household data back to its manufacturing headquarters because it isn't even smart enough to figure out how to get out from under a chair.

When we first added connected devices and services to our home, I thought they were fun new toys, and I was aware that they would be capturing certain amounts of our data for their parent companies. But this article on having an entirely smart home, made me realize how much data is actually being sent.

From reading that account, I am somewhat reassured that having a fully connected home right now is a pain. (Mostly because few of the applications are compatible with each other.) But I am sure someone is working on solving that problem. So I wonder what my son's future life will be like when he has an even "smarter" home than we have today.

Will he be OK with the trade off of data for convenience? Or will there be a big backlash over the control of our data before then? I don't know for sure, but I do know that I will be asking more questions when we decide to connect something new to our home. After all - I would hate to feel haunted by the technology we keep.

How many smart devices are connected to your home? Share the number in the comments.

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