The Coming Commodification of Life at Home
The Atlantic
The thought experiment I put to Lowenthal—the CEO of The Media Kitchen, an advertising consulting firm—wasn’t some far-off hypothetical. Over the past several years, the American home has seen a proliferation of “smart,” or internet-connected, devices and appliances. There are, of course, smart speakers (which roughly a quarter of American homes have) and smart thermostats, as well as smart thermometers, smart mattress covers, smart coffee makers, smart doorbells, and even, yes, smart toasters. After Amazon recently announced the release of a slew of products compatible with its Alexa voice assistant, including a smart microwave and a smart wall clock, an executive for the company said he could imagine “a future with thousands of devices like this.”
Read: Alexa, should we trust you?
Ellen Goodman, a law professor at Rutgers University who studies information-privacy law, expects that the data accumulated in smart homes will primarily be of interest not to advertisers like Lowenthal, but to the device makers. If the milk is running low in a smart fridge, maybe the manufacturer has a partnership with a grocery-delivery service that would make sure the dairy is replenished. Or perhaps an internet-connected sound system could beam back data that would help the device maker sell various accoutrements; electronic-music fans might be prime candidates for subwoofers.
Goodman sees a number of ways in which smart appliances could make the consumer’s life better. For one, because the devices are connected to the internet, their manufacturers could observe failures or glitches before a frustrated customer even notices them and calls for help. More broadly, companies could start to get a lot more visibility into how people use their stuff, which might help them improve their products in a way customers like.
But Goodman focused on two main dangers when considering homes full of internet-connected devices. The first was, as she puts it, “the monetization of every move you make.” In an environment where every sip of milk, every hour of TV watched, and every board game played could be used to try to sell you something else—to say nothing of the potential bombardment of hyper-specific ads—people’s behavior might change. Maybe I want a glass of whiskey before going to bed, but I don’t want any systems logging it—would I pour one anyway? It’s not hard to imagine a “private drinking mode” or some sort of open-source app that could be used to conceal one’s true behavior from watchful devices.
These systems could have a more active role in shaping behavior, too. Tech companies specialize in serving up things that are like the things people have preferred in the past, which generally means that “what we do, we get more of it,” Goodman says. “Can we imagine that in terms of our real-life behaviors in our home?” Even if the effects are salutary—maybe the smart showerhead learns its user’s preferred water temperature, or the smart fridge discourages its owner from eating junk food late at night—“I think there’s just a kind of compromise of one’s freedom, to have anything replicated, reified, reinforced in ways that you’re not choosing,” Goodman says. This is already happening with the media and entertainment that people encounter on YouTube or Spotify, but smart homes could transpose this dynamic into physical space.
Even if they do catch on, Lowenthal said it’s not clear whether people will want a toothbrush that transmits their data to advertisers (or to anyone). But he can imagine people coming around. Even if many Americans are currently wary of what big tech companies are doing with their data, Lowenthal thinks that they nonetheless adore something that lets them turn on the lights without using their hands or adjust the temperature of their living room from the other side of the world. And if they’re thrilled with the product, they’ll be more comfortable being monitored by it.
The squeamishness that some may have about their data led Lowenthal to speculate, though, that two tiers of products could emerge. “It wouldn’t surprise me if there are some companies that wind up costing more and positioning themselves as premium because they tell consumers that they’ll never sell their data—it almost becomes a differentiator,” he said.
For instance, iRobot, the maker of the Roomba, has access to a trove of floor-plan data that marketers would be eager to use. But the company doesn’t sell it. “Our customers invite us into their most personal spaces—their homes—because they trust that our products will help them do more,” a company spokesperson wrote in an email. “iRobot takes that trust seriously. And we believe that our customers have a right to privacy in their homes.”
Companies that are more willing to share users’ data introduce a variety of privacy concerns. “Many of these [smart devices], when taken by themselves, do not represent significant privacy risks,” says Pam Dixon, the executive director of the World Privacy Forum, a nonprofit research group. The larger concern is where data goes once it’s stored on a company’s servers. How long is it kept? Can users delete it? Will a third-party company have access to it, and if so, what will it be used for? If the answers to these questions aren’t clear, people’s personal data might be accessible to all sorts of businesses—advertisers, insurers—without their knowledge.
It’s not clear when or if the smart home of the future will arrive. “In some ways, we’re already there,” Goodman said at one point in our conversation. “This is not super futuristic.” But in other ways, we aren’t. My toothbrush is still a piece of plastic that can’t commune with the cloud. It seems the main obstacle to the realization of the fully smart home doesn’t have to do with unease about data collection, but rather with convincing people that a microwave that can take voice commands is better than a microwave that can’t. And then, the data collection will follow.
We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.
Follow Us!