What Everybody Knows About You: Your Home

This is the second article in a series about data collection today. The first article introduced the broad scope of the topic. Now we’ll start to look at particular venues for data collection.

Is your home tracking you? A 2023 survey found that “The average U.S. household with internet access had 17 connected devices in 2023.” Although some U.S. homes (scandalously) lack internet access, most have it. So the question is what “smart” devices are telling the manufacturers about us. “Smart” refers to a combination of embedded processors, connectivity (WiFi, Bluetooth, and internet), and analytics that might employ machine learning to interpret your actions or requests.

The most voracious devices in the home are streaming television players. Cable companies and streaming services know what you watch and when, which provides reliable information on your interests—the kind of person you are and what you like. But your TV-watching behavior also says a lot more about you: your location, how much you watch, when you go to sleep, and so on. From this information, companies can guess your educational level, whether you work, and more.

The information is used relatively benignly to target you with the next Northern Italy-based food porn show you view or yet another Game of Thrones knock-off. Studios even use the data now to design new programs, making decisions that range from genre to casting. In a pattern we’ll see repeatedly, the data collected by the streaming device is combined with input from other sources, such as consumer reviews on social media. The data can also be sold to firms with little or no connection to the activity during which the data was collected, and then used to model your interests in great detail for advertising.

The next leading entry among smart devices who know you are voice-activated recorders such as Apple’s ground-breaking Siri, Amazon.com’s Alexa, and the Google Home Assistant. These are always listening to you, although the vendors promise that they don’t record anything until you explicitly wake them up through a command such as “Hey Siri.”

While you’re talking to these devices, they keep a record not only of the words you say, but your tone of voice, the conversations you have with other people, and the sounds in your environment. Researchers find that these devices might capture more than you explicitly offer them.

So your television service and smart speaker record a lot about you. But many people nowadays also have “smart devices” scattered throughout the home: security cameras and video doorbells, energy monitors, lights that know when you enter or leave a room, appliances that anticipate your getting up in the morning or arriving at home in the evening, temperature sensors, etc.

Many of the new appliances (lights, washers, coffee makers) can be activated and controlled through one of the smart speakers mentioned earlier, in which case the vendor of the smart speaker collects information about you.

Manufacturers can derive information from a robot vacuum cleaner’s photos and usage patterns about the size of your house, where you spend most of your time, and other hints about your lifestyle.

Even the app I downloaded recently to manage my printer jobs collects data about my use of the printer, which the manufacturer combines with other information they have on me as their customer (although I can opt out from data collection, since I was educated enough to read the privacy policy).

Finally, electrical companies can track your energy use throughout the day. This has social value, because the companies can tune the production of energy to consumer needs and suggest ways that consumers can avoid peak usage that requires the use of expensive, polluting, and climate-harming power plants.

But the information on your schedule and behavior, whether collected by streaming video companies, smart speakers, devices, or energy companies, can be used to derive implications about your income, your lifestyle, your health, and more.

The next article of the series, what your car knows about you, takes data tracking outdoors.

<< Read the previous part of this series