The hidden cost of smart home technology

There’s always been something aspirational about the term “smart home.” It was coined by a residential builder association here in the U.S. back in the mid-’80s.

That, of course, was long before the invention of tech that we now think of as hallmarks of a smart home. Things like cloud-based voice assistants and lighting systems controlled by apps. There’s also the refrigerator that not only tracks expiration dates, but even writes grocery lists for you.

42% of American households with internet now own at least one smart home device, according to the market research firm Parks Associates. In her new book, “Threshold: How Smart Homes Change Us Inside and Out,” Heather Suzanne Woods, director of the A.Q. Miller School of Media and Communication at Kansas State University, asks whether that’s a good thing.

In a recent interview, Marketplace’s Lily Jamali asked her how the industry has gone about marketing the smart home to consumers.

The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.

Heather Woods: The pitch is that a smart home can be anything we want it to be in this utopia that maybe doesn’t exist, but we’re getting close to it with the use of technology. That definitely struck me when I was doing some of my early research in the book. I went out to a number of smart homes throughout the United States. I also went to conferences where they were pitching tech products, and there was the sense that we can have better living through technology. So, there’s this sort of futuristic framework. It’s really about a sense of convenience or a sense of ease or pleasure or joy, but this sort of really positive, shiny chrome exterior doesn’t always reflect what is happening under the surface.

Lily Jamali: Tell me what you mean by that.

Woods: I simply mean that the main argument of the book is that smart homes are changing how we live inside and outside of the home, whether or not we live in the home. And so there are maybe some contexts or examples where a technology is pitched as a product that will solve this problem or will make our lives easier, and in reality, it might be causing problems and making our homes more difficult to manage.

I’ll also say that I think that there’s this sense that Ring security cameras and other smart technologies that are made to watch the exterior of our homes make us safer. But I’m a little dubious of that claim. I would like to see people think about their individual safety as connected to community safety and wellbeing.

Jamali: That’s such an interesting point, because when we adopt these technologies, we might be willing to make certain sacrifices with our privacy, but you write that we’re also sort of imposing these compromises on the people in our communities.

Woods: Yes. Let me give a sort of silly example that I give when I’m talking to students. My neighborhood is a pretty well-connected community. We have block parties; we have neighborhood garage sales. When I go out of town, my neighbors pull up my trash bin and my recycling bin for me. But over the past year or so, I’ve noticed an increase in Ring cameras throughout the neighborhood, and it occurred to me there was now an increased sort of surveillance network. So, every time I would walk by a Ring camera or another company’s home security camera – I’m not just picking on Ring – there would be a record of my presence. And I did not opt into that. I did not purchase that device. But the point is that we don’t have to opt into that technology to be affected by it.

Jamali: You use a phrase in the book that’s actually very powerful, talking about smart devices as an “umbilical cord between massive technology corporations and intimate parts of our lives.” It’s a striking image but it’s not a very pleasant one. Do you think that smart home technology is ultimately harmful?

Woods: I think in large part, the current smart home doesn’t serve all of us, or even most of us. The way that they’re designed and marketed and used really privilege some people over others. They incentivize fear and individualism over collaboration and collectivity. It’s easier to sell a smart security camera if you’re afraid of your neighbors or the world more generally. Now that said, am I in favor of a wholesale rejection of technology? No, I think that we can rework existing technology, so they serve more of us, but that’s going to require not just a technical shift, but a cultural and honestly, economic and political shift as well.

Jamali: Getting more specific, you outline how smart technology has remade, to some extent, what our homes look like. You give the example of something called the “drop zone.” This is a sort of intermediate space in a home where deliveries can be left. What stands out to you about that example?  

Woods: The drop zone is a solution to a problem that perhaps didn’t exist 10 years ago, the concept of the porch pirate. If you receive a lot of deliveries from Amazon or others, the drop zone was really meant to solve the problem of unattended delivery. And what’s striking about this space is that when I was touring homes that had this drop zone, it was one of the first things that they showed me, and one of the ways that they architected the smart space was to create this entirely new zone where individuals who were delivering goods would not ever need to interact with homeowners or the people buying the goods. And I wasn’t even sure what the room was until they told me. It looked like a mini kitchen. It had its own separate refrigerator for grocery delivery service, but it was also incredibly surveilled. There were lots of cameras. It was very distant from the actual interior of the home, so it was almost like an inside that was outside, a way to invite strangers into the home. But also, it was also fairly fearful of those strangers, if we can take all of these security measures as evidence.

Jamali: The underlying theme here seems to be pretty centered on socioeconomics. A lot of us won’t ever be able to afford some of these technologies, or maybe we don’t live in a space that would allow for a thing like a drop zone.

Woods: I think that you really hit the nail on the head. There are a couple of points I want to mention relative to that. One is that when I say that smart homes change the way we live, whether or not we live in them, I’m thinking of contingent workers, warehouse delivery workers, warehouse pickers, who may not live in smart homes, but are certainly influenced their work in their daily life, their physical life is influenced by them.

I’m also thinking about the unequal way that surveillance functions. For some people, surveillance is power. If I have a doorbell camera, that gives me a sense of security because I can check out into the world on my neighbors. But the inverse isn’t always true.

The third thing I want to share, and this is sort of a guess that I have, but I think that it’s increasingly becoming true over time. Right now, the smart product is the premium product, right? So, when we go to buy an appliance or a device, it’s going to cost a little bit more to get the smart tech because that smart tech is seen as a service. I perceive that in the coming years, the inverse is going to be true. The smart technology built into homes is going to be used in almost the same way that social media is used, where you as the user are also the product. You are the service; your data is the value. And right now, I would say that smart homes are in large part for the digitally privileged subject, but I think over time that data collection is going to shift in an opposite direction and people who are wealthy, people who have privilege will be able to opt out or will be able to segment their digital and virtual lives for privacy and others may not.