The 1999 Disney movie “Smart House” was not only a fun and entertaining 90-minute movie, but it was actually pretty prescient about modern smart homes.
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In the movie, the Cooper family gets a house with AI built into it. Called “PAT,” short for “Personal Applied Technology,” this virtual assistant can control nearly every aspect of your home, from lighting to cleaning to food preparation.
Everything goes smoothly at first. However, PAT eventually goes rogue, trapping the Cooper family inside their home and terrorizing them. That reversal from obligatory smart house to nightmarish fun house is not far off from many of the current problems plaguing modern smart home technology.
Learn more about smart homes in episode 2 of season 5 of the Quartz Obsession podcast, available now. Listen to “Smart Home: Prepare for a Crash” wherever you get your podcasts: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google | Stitcher | YouTube
Significant barriers remain to smart home adoption
According to a report from Plume, a software-as-a-service company, in 2022 the average U.S. home had about 20 smart devices. The Internet of Things (IoT) product market, on the other hand, is an umbrella term for connected physical things. According to ResearchAndMarkets.Com, device sales are expected to exceed $313 billion worldwide by 2027. However, ongoing issues with smart home technology may be slowing the pace of adoption.
Unlike the hypothetical PAT of a smart home, the technology currently used in homes is fragmented and relies on a variety of connected devices to perform different functions. These devices can control various aspects of your home, including your thermostat, garage door, and security cameras.
Companies promise that IoT products will bring ease of use, convenience, and integrated functionality to our home lives. However, the value proposition and vision of an automated home that is perfect for families often falls short.
Smart home devices have interoperability issues
In an ideal world, consumers would be able to purchase a smart device, turn it on, and have it work seamlessly with other devices in their home. Unfortunately, this is often not the case with today's products due to a lack of standardization in the industry.
Today, devices use different network protocols such as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Zigbee, and Z-wave, so not all devices can connect or communicate with each other. Introducing a new device may require downloading a new app to control it, creating a digital version of the “too many remotes” dilemma.
However, the problem is being resolved. Some market-leading companies, including Amazon, Apple, and Google, announced a standard communication protocol called Matter in 2019 that aims to become the industry's new wireless standard.
According to technology market research firm ABI Research, adoption of the new standard is expected to gain momentum. In 2022, we predicted that over the next five years, half of the world's “major” smart devices will be compatible with Matter.
Smart home devices are vulnerable to cyber attacks
Anyone in the world with an Internet connection could exploit software vulnerabilities to hack into your home. According to a report by Czech security company Avast, approximately 41% (pdf) of smart homes are equipped with at least one hackable device that can put the entire home at risk.
Inadequate security begins at the manufacturing stage. Many devices do not encrypt your data, leaving your information vulnerable to being stolen by third parties. Your device may have few or no software updates. This means that both the design and security of the device can quickly become outdated. Another problem is that strong passwords are often lacking or factory default passwords are used.
A major cyberattack on the East Coast of the United States in 2016 demonstrated that smart devices can compromise not only individual homes, but broader networks. The hacker used insecure devices at home, such as routers and baby monitors, to create a botnet (many computers infected with malware) that took down his entire website, including Twitter, Reddit, and CNN.com. I did.
Your smart device may be spying on you
Smart devices collect personal data not only because it may be necessary to perform their functions, but also because the data is a regular source of value for businesses. Tech giants Google and Meta may deny “selling” data to third parties, but say they do not share users' information with competing advertisers bidding to place ads. It doesn't mean anything.
A 2019 study (pdf) conducted by Imperial College London and Northeastern University examined the privacy of 81 different types of IoT devices. After conducting more than 34,500 controlled experiments, we found that most devices such as smart speakers, televisions, and electronics collect personal information and share it with third parties.
Imagine asking your voice assistant, Alexa, to find a place to get pizza in your neighborhood. That information may be recorded and sent to a central server owned by Amazon. That information may then be displayed to advertisers looking to target your next customer. This means that homes filled with smart devices will also become places where companies collect data that can be monetized, further blurring the line between privacy and private enterprise.
There is no way to take ownership of your personal data
Even if consumers are comfortable sharing their data, they are still giving away their data for free. Although there is currently no way for consumers to monetize their personal data, solutions are being proposed.
One business model, called “sensing as a service” (S2aaS), is being discussed in academic circles as a way to compensate people for information (pdf). The idea is that data consumers (i.e. technology companies) pay data producers (i.e. smart device users) for the information they produce.
Smart home devices can be faulty, unreliable, and unnecessary
Many smart home devices are low-tech products with high-tech surfaces, like a smart hairbrush that can identify frizz, a smart egg tray that tracks expiration dates, and a $100 smart toaster that sends push notifications.
When the internet goes down, a smart home can become even more “sluggish” than a home without devices. You might not be able to turn on your lights, change your thermostat, or even turn your home security on or off. Alert – The incidents that wreaked havoc on British homes in 2018.
Even when everything is supposed to be working properly, people with so-called smart homes are reporting strange phenomena, like Alexa emitting a creepy laugh or Smart Sync faucets triggering. Masu. specific radio frequency. A homeowner in Massachusetts has been unable to turn off his 7,000 smart lights for over a year due to a software issue.
Modern smart homes are a far cry from the dreaded smart house PAT, but they can still cause headaches. When you have multiple connected devices in your home, you often have to juggle communication protocols, deal with opaque privacy rules, and tolerate a host of security vulnerabilities in your home. In the end, sticking with a “boring” home might be the smarter option.
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