The Allure of the Smart Home

What exactly is a smart home, and why would I want to live in one?

I don't think the smart home concept is just about having the latest cool technology or containing some smart stuff. And many of the most commonly discussed examples of smart technology in the home seem to be merely modest improvements on earlier technologies, rather than something entirely new.

Let's look at some smart devices you might have in your home. Programmable thermostats have been available for ages, adjusting heating and/or air conditioning to maintain a comfortable temperature at certain times of day. Modern heating systems can now offer separate controls for each room, and be programmed to reduce your total energy consumption: such systems are typically marketed as intelligent systems. So whatever smart technology is doing in this area looks more like useful improvement than radical change.

Or how about remote control functionality. Remote control devices have been around for a long time, especially for couch potatoes who wished to change TV channels without the effort of walking a few feet across the room. Now we have voice-activated controls, for people who can't even be bothered to search under the cushions for the remote control device. Voice activation may be a bit more technologically sophisticated than pushing buttons, and some artificial intelligence may be required to recognize and interpret the voice commands, but it's basically the same need that is being satisfied here.

Or how about a chatbot to answer your questions? In most cases, the answers aren't hard-wired into the device, but are pulled from some source outside the home. So the chatbot is merely a communication device, as if you had a telephone hotline to Stephen Fry only faster and always available, like several million Stephen Fry clones working in parallel around the clock. (You may choose any other  knowledgeable and witty celebrity if you prefer.)

And the idea that having a chatbot device in your home makes the home itself smart is like thinking that having a smartphone in the pocket of your trousers turns them into smart trousers. Or that having Stephen Fry's phone number attached to your fridge door turns it into a smart fridge.

Of course, a smart system may have multiple components - different classes of device. You might install an intelligent security system, using cameras and other devices, to recognize and admit your children and pets, while keeping the home safe from unwanted visitors.

But surely the concept of smart home means more than just having a number of smart parts or subsystems, it implies that the home itself manifests some intelligence at the whole-system level. The primary requirement seems to be that these smart devices are connected, not to the world outside the home, but to each other, enabling them to orchestrate things. Not just home automation, but seamless home automation.

For example, suppose I make my home responsible for getting me to work on time. My home computer could monitor the traffic reports or disruption on public transport, check with my car whether I needed to allow extra time to refuel, send a message to my alarm clock to wake me up at the optimal time, having also instructed the heating system when to switch the boiler on.

Assuming I do not wish my movements to be known in advance by burglars and kidnappers, all of these messages need to be secure against eavesdropping. It isn't obvious to me why it would be necessary to transmit these messages via servers outside my house. Yes I know it's called the internet of things, but does that mean everything has to go via the internet?

Well yes apparently it does, if we follow the recently announced Connected Home over IP (CHIP) standards, to be developed jointly by Amazon, Apple, Google, and most of the other key players in the smart home market.

Many of those who commented on the Register article raised concerns about encryption. It seems unlikely at this point that the tech giants will be keen on end-end encryption, because surely they are going to want to feed your data into the hungry mouths of their machine learning starlings. So whatever security measures are included in the CHIP standards, they will probably represent a compromise, appearing to take security seriously but not seriously impeding the commercial and strategic interests of the vendors. Smart for them, not necessarily for us.

Sometimes it seems that the people who benefit most from the smart home are not those actually living in these homes but service providers, using your data to keep an eye on you. For example, landlords:

Smart home technology is an alluring proposition for the apartment industry: Provide renters with a home that integrates with and responds to their lifestyle, and ­increase rents, save on energy, and collect useful resident population data in return. Kayla Devon

Internet-connected locks and facial recognition systems have raised privacy concerns among tenants across the country. A sales pitch directed at landlords by a smart-home security company indicates that the technology could help them raise rental prices and potentially get people evicted. Alfred Ng

We should pass a law that would hold smart access companies to the highest possible standard while making certain that their technology is safe, secure and reliable for tenants. Michael McKee

Energy companies have been pushing smart meters and other smart technologies, supposedly to help you reduce your energy bills, but also to get involved in other aspects of your life. For example, Constellation promotes the benefits of smart home technology for maintaining the independence of the elderly, while Karen Jorden mentions the possibility of remote surveillance by family members living elsewhere.

Smart technology that recognizes patterns, such as the morning coffee-making routine mentioned earlier, could come in handy when those patterns are broken, perhaps alerting grown children that something may be amiss with an elderly parent. Karen Jordan

As Ashlee Clark Thompson points out, this kind of remote surveillance can benefit the children as well as the parents, providing peace of mind as well as reducing the need for physical visits to check up. 

And doubtless the energy companies have other ideas as well. According to Ross Clark

Scottish and Southern Electricity Networks has proposed a system in which it will be able to turn off certain devices in our homes ... when the supply of electricity is too small to meet demand.

Finally, Ian Dunt grumbled that his smart thermostat was like having a secret flatmate.

It's really not clear to me why I paid extra to be undermined by my own heating.

— Ian Dunt (@IanDunt) November 16, 2020

and got dozens of Tweets in reply, from people with similar frustrations.

So we keep coming back to the fundamental ethical question: Whom shall the smart home serve?

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Footnote May 2021

Some legal advice for landlords just in from US law firm Orrick: "Tenant data may be an attractive source of new revenue, but landlords should proceed with caution" (13 May 2021). They also note that "New York City Council has enacted a Tenant Data Privacy Act that is poised to enhance privacy protections in multifamily buildings in the city" (27 May 2021).

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Dieter Bohn, Situation: there are too many competing smart home standards. Surely a new one will fix it, right? (The Verge, 19 Dec 2019)

Ross Clark, The critics of smart meters were right all along (Telegraph, 19 September 2020) HT @tprstly

Constellation, Smart Homes Allow the Aging to Maintain Independence (published 20 July 2018 updated 13 August 2018)

Kayla Devon, The Lure of the Smart Apartment (MFE, 31 March 2016)

Karen Jordan, Set It And Forget It: The Lure Of Smart Apartments (Forbes, 28 August 2017)

Kieren McCarthy, The IoT wars are over, maybe? Amazon, Apple, Google give up on smart-home domination dreams, agree to develop common standards (The Register, 18 Dec 2019)

Michael McKee, Your Landlord Could Know That You’re Not at Home Right Now (New York Times, 17 December 2019)

Alfred Ng, Smart home tech can help evict renters, surveillance company tells landlords (CNET, 25 October 2019)

Ashlee Clark Thompson, Persuading your older parents to take the smart home leap (CNET, 11 April 2017)

Shannon Yavorsky and David Curtis, Unlocking the Value of Tenant Data (Orrick 13 May 2021), Home Alone? New York City Enacts Tenant Data Privacy Act ( Orrick 27 May 2021) HT @christinayiotis

Related posts: Understanding the Value Chain of the Internet of Things (June 2015), Defeating the Device Paradigm (Oct 2015), Hidden Functionality (February 2019), Towards Chatbot Ethics - Whom does the chatbot serve? (May 2019), Driverless cars - Whom does the technology serve? (May 2019), The Road Less Travelled - Whom does the algorithm serve? (June 2019)

 

 Updated 16 November 2020, 29 May 2021

Towards Chatbot Ethics

When over-enthusiastic articles describe chatbotics as the Holy Grail (for digital marketing or online retail or whatever), I should normally ignore this as the usual hyperbole. But in this case, I'm going to take it literally. Let me explain.

As followers of the Parsifal legend will know, at a critical point in the story Parsifal fails to ask the one question that matters: "Whom does the Grail serve?"

And anyone who wishes to hype chatbots as some kind of "holy grail" must also ask the same question: "Whom does the Chatbot serve?" IBM puts this at the top of its list of ethical questions for chatbots, as does @ashevat (formerly with Slack).

To the extent that a chatbot is providing information and advice, it is subject to many of the same ethical considerations as any other information source - is the information complete, truthful and unbiased, or does it serve the information provider's commercial interest? Perhaps the chatbot (or rather its owner) is getting a commission if you eat at the recommended restaurant, just as hotel concierges have always done. A restaurant review in an online or traditional newspaper may appear to be independent, but restaurants have many ways of rewarding favourable reviews even without cash changing hands. You might think it is ethical for this to be transparent.

But an important difference between a chatbot and a newspaper article is that the chatbot has a greater ability to respond to the particular concerns and vulnerabilities of the user. Shiva Bhaska discusses how this power can be used for manipulation and even intimidation. And making sure the user knows that they are talking to a bot rather than a human does not guard against an emotional reaction: Joseph Weizenbaum was one of the first in the modern era to recognize this.

One area where particularly careful ethical scrutiny is required is the use of chatbots for mental health support. Obviously there are concerns about efficacy and safety as well as privacy, and such systems need to undergo clinical trials for efficacy and potential adverse outcomes, just like any other medical intervention. Kira Kretzschmar et al argue that it is also essential that these platforms are specifically programmed to discourage over-reliance, and that users are encouraged to seek human support in the case of an emergency.


Another ethical problem with chatbots is related to the Weasley doctrine (named after Arthur Weasley in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets):

"Never trust anything that can think for itself if you can't see where it keeps its brain."

Many people have installed these curious cylindrical devices in their homes, but is that where the intelligence is actually located? When a private conversation was accidentally transmitted from Portland to Seattle, engineers at Amazon were able to inspect the logs, coming up with a somewhat implausible explanation as to how this might have occurred. Obviously this implies a lack of boundaries between the device and the manufacturer. And as @geoffreyfowler reports, chatbots don't only send recordings of your voice back to Master Control, they also send status reports from all your other connected devices.

Smart home, huh? Smart for whom? Transparency for whom? Or to put it another way, whom does the chatbot serve?

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Shiva Bhaskar, The Chatbots That Will Manipulate Us (30 June 2017)

Geoffrey A. Fowler, Alexa has been eavesdropping on you this whole time (Washington Post, 6 May 2019) HT@hypervisible

Sidney Fussell, Behind Every Robot Is a Human (The Atlantic, 15 April 2019)

Tim Harford, Can a computer fool you into thinking it is human? (BBC 25 September 2019)

Gary Horcher, Woman says her Amazon device recorded private conversation, sent it out to random contact (25 May 2018)

Kira Kretzschmar et al, Can Your Phone Be Your Therapist? Young People’s Ethical Perspectives on the Use of Fully Automated Conversational Agents (Chatbots) in Mental Health Support (Biomed Inform Insights, 11, 5 March 2019)

Trips Reddy, The code of ethics for AI and chatbots that every brand should follow (IBM 15 October 15, 2017)

Amir Shevat, Hard questions about bot ethics (Slack Platform Blog, 12 October 2016)

Tom Warren, Amazon explains how Alexa recorded a private conversation and sent it to another user (The Verge, 24 May 2018)

Joseph Weizenbaum, Computer Power and Human Reason (WH Freeman, 1976)


Related posts: Understanding the Value Chain of the Internet of Things (June 2015), Whom does the technology serve? (May 2019), The Road Less Travelled (June 2019), The Allure of the Smart Home (December 2019), The Sad Reality of Chatbotics (December 2021)

updated 4 October 2019

Hidden Functionality

Consumer surveillance was in the news again this week. Apparently Google forgot to tell consumers that there was a cuckoo microphone in the Nest.

So what's new? A few years ago, people were getting worried about a microphone inside the Samsung Smart TV that would eavesdrop your conversations. (HT @Parker Higgins)

But at least in those cases we think we know which corporation is responsible. In other cases, this may not be so clear-cut. For example, who decided to install a camera into the seat-back entertainment systems used by several airlines?

And there is a much more general problem here. It is usually cheaper to use general-purpose hardware than to design special purpose hardware. For this reason, most IoT devices have far more processing power and functionality than they strictly need. This extra functionality carries two dangers. Firstly, if when the device is hacked, the functionality can be coopted for covert or malicious purposes. (For example IoT devices with weak or non-existent security can be recruited into a global botnet.) Secondly, sooner or later someone will think of a justification for switching the functionality on. (In the case of the Nest microphone Google already did, which is what alerted people to the microphone's existence.)

So who is responsible for the failure of a component to act properly, who is responsible for the limitation of purpose, and how can this responsibility be transparently enforced?

Some US politicians have started talking about a technology version of "food labelling" - so that people can avoid products and services if they are sensitive to a particular "ingredient". With physical products, this information would presumably be added to the safety leaflet that you find in the box whenever you buy anything electrical. With online services, this information should be included in the Privacy Notice, which again nobody reads. (There are various estimates about the number of weeks it would take you to read all these notices.) So clearly it is unreasonable to expect the consumer to police this kind of thing.

Just as the supermarkets have a "free from" aisle where they sell all the overpriced gluten-free food, perhaps we can ask electronics retailers to have a "connectivity-free" section, where the products can be guaranteed safe from Ray Ozzie's latest initiative, which is to build devices that connect automatically by default, rather than wait for the user to switch the connectivity on. (Hasn't he heard of privacy and security by default?)

And of course high-tech functionality is no longer limited to products that are obviously electrical. The RFID tags in your clothes may not always be deactivated when you leave the store. And for other examples of SmartClothing, check out my posts on Wearable Tech.

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Nick Bastone, Google says the built-in microphone it never told Nest users about was 'never supposed to be a secret' (Business Insider, 19 February 2019)

Nick Bastone, Democratic presidential candidates are tearing into Google for the hidden Nest microphone, and calling for tech gadget 'ingredients' labels (Business Insider, 21 February 2019)

Ina Fried, Exclusive: Ray Ozzie wants to wirelessly connect the world (Axios, 22 February 2019)

Melissa Locker, Someone found cameras in Singapore Airlines’ in-flight entertainment system (Fast Company, 20 February 2019)

Ben Schoon, Nest Secure can now be turned into another Google Assistant speaker for your home (9 to 5 Google, 4 February 2019)

Related posts: Have you got Big Data in your Underwear? (December 2014), Towards the Internet of Underthings (November 2015), Pax Technica - On Risk and Security (November 2017), Outdated Assumptions - Connectivity Hunger (June 2018), Shoshana Zuboff on Surveillance Capitalism (February 2019)