Published on BBC | By Jane Wakefield
For two months in early 2018, technology journalist Kashmir Hill let innocent household items spy on her.
“My smart home was not convenient. Things didn’t work, the privacy trade-off was not worth it.”
She had turned her one-bedroom apartment into a “smart home” and was measuring how much data was being collected by the firms that made the devices. Her smart toothbrush betrayed when she had not brushed her teeth, her television revealed when she had spent the day bingeing on programmes, and her smart speaker spoke to the world’s largest online retailer every day. It was like living in a “commercial, surveillance state” with “not a single hour of digital silence”, she said.
But while some consumers are prepared to part with their data for the convenience of access to free services such as Facebook and Google, Ms Hill did not feel this was true of her smart experiment.
Read entire article TED 2018: The smart home that spied on its owner