An in-depth look at the scary experience of living in a smart home and how it creates new streams of personal information that can be used to profile us
In December, I converted my one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco into a “smart home.” I connected as many of my appliances …
Context & Ripple Effects
This first-person experiment extends a thread of coverage about what connected devices actually capture indoors: Wired had already documented how Echo and Home record your voice and what happens to those recordings. By wiring an entire one-bedroom apartment rather than a single speaker, the author turns that question from 'what does one device hear' into 'what does a whole home know.'
The piece also lands mid-arc on two fronts the related coverage tracks: the gap between marketed intelligence and reality — The Verge's later argument that today's smart home is really just a remote-controlled home short on data sharing and interoperability — and the emerging harm side, where reporters found domestic abusers weaponizing smart locks, cameras, and lighting. Profiling risk and misuse risk are two faces of the same telemetry.
First-order effects
- Every appliance the author connects becomes a sensor feeding a vendor's profile: occupancy rhythms, voice queries, usage patterns — data streams that did not exist when the same apartment ran on dumb devices.
- The burden of understanding and limiting collection falls entirely on the resident; as the earlier voice-recording coverage showed, scrubbing data requires per-device effort most households will not sustain.
Second-order effects
- Platform owners gain leverage from exactly this fragmentation: Google's later response to the Works with Nest shutdown — limited Home Routines and an opt-in Device Access program — shows vendors consolidating control over who may read home data once its value becomes obvious.
- Documented misuse by abusers pushes device makers toward safety features and audit logs they never designed for, because the same remote access that enables convenience enables stalking.
Third-order effects
- If whole-home instrumentation becomes default housing infrastructure, the home joins the street and the phone as a routine surveillance site — the dynamic San Francisco's own arc, from surveillance laboratory to banning law-enforcement facial recognition, suggests cities will eventually have to govern.
- Consumer IoT likely consolidates around a few platforms willing to arbitrate data access, with interoperability granted conditionally rather than by right — trading the open-gadget era for walled gardens in exchange for perceived security.
The trend: Homes are becoming continuously instrumented data environments faster than privacy norms, interoperability standards, or abuse safeguards can keep up.