Description:
A short video about Kashmir Hill, senior reporter at Gizmodo, who turned her one bedroom apartment into a smart home. The goal of the experiment was to see how much could be monitored about herself and her family
What is it?
Hill installed a smart tv, a smart speaker and an internet connected toothbrush, coffee maker, smart vacuum cleaner and matras tracker, baby monitor and smart lights. This way she tracked a lot of data about herself and her family. But what seemed harmless fun at first changed when Hill found out that all the data were sent to the manufacturers of smart devices.
Why is it interesting?
People like to track their behaviour to learn from the patterns. It is something else when manufacturers can see the data too. The information may not seem very special or private at first but if a third party knows a lot about you it still tells a lot. Especially because it’s not completely clear what they will do with the information in the future. What if they send the data to insurance companies who then change your policy because you don’t sleep enough or don’t brush thoroughly enough? The smart devices as smart spies.
Key take away/Quote
“It may be the case that today you don’t care if your privacy is violated, but if it comes back to haunt you in 1, 5 or 10 years from now there is no undoing in what happened today”
