Smart Homes: Environments of Exposure and Control

Summary

Different ideas about what the smart home is and could be persist in academic literature and real-world applications. These differences reflect alternative notions of “smartness”; the dominant belief in smart home corporate marketing portrays the home as an idealized site of seamless data collection and automated use, providing technology-driven, convenient home control for consumers. In doing so, the home becomes a site of dense data generation and collection activity that offers monetization prospects for smart home device and service providers. The smart home is, unsurprisingly, a place of interest for many academic disciplines, including Science and Technology Studies (STS), computer science, Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), and law.

Commercial marketing narratives highlight the benefits that can arise from embedded home technologies to facilitate total knowledge and control of home systems and uses. Multiple sensorized devices underlie the smart home’s glossy façade and provide the infrastructural means for consumer convenience. These include a panoply of home appliances—kitchen equipment, security systems, thermostats—as well as media devices of all kinds. These sensorized devices provide the smart home’s operational infrastructure, which is based on continuous collections of device data that are repetitively analyzed in near to real time. The marketed vision is thus based on a seamless operation of the smart home that is predicated on vast forms of complex and multifaceted data collections, which are ultimately driven by commercial imperatives.

The purpose of data collection is to identify historicized patterns of activity that can then be used to predict future behaviors of home participants. “Smartness,” in the marketized sense of the commercialized smart home, is underpinned by computational logics that are increasingly automated to produce “intelligence” about behaviors. Once a data history is developed, real-time participant behaviors can then be shaped to meet the designated computational expectations of how the home should be used more effectively and efficiently. For the smart home to work effectively, home participants must therefore be exposed to behavioral analysis through continuous data collection. A question arises, then, about what level of control is achievable in densely automated environments like the smart home, which depends on participant exposure.

To explore that question, it is necessary to think about participant exposures and what those exposures consist of to critically examine whether individual participant control can ever be exerted over the potential intrusions of smart home exposure. At the outset, it should be noted that exposure in the smart home is differential, as both the degree of exposure and the impacts that can flow from smart home data exposures are not equal across all types of participants. Some participants are more vulnerable than others to the uneven effects of smart home data exposure, which reemphasizes that corporate targeting and marketing of devices and services are aimed at certain types of participants. Three forms of data exposure processes are identified in this article: behavioral, segmented, and predicted process exposures, which outline the computational logics at play in the commercialized smart home.

The highlighting of automated processes shows that the home, the place that is generally thought to be enclosable, requires significant degrees of participant exposure when it goes smart, at least in a technological sense. Exploring exposures helps to outline the contours of control that flow in the marketized smart home. Home participants have some capacity to control, especially through the forms of structural and individual controls generated by smart home fragmentation, which continue to limit full surveillance capabilities. Nevertheless, surveillance and monitoring are close to the surface and four perspectives of surveillant control are pertinent: disciplinary, modulatory, corporate, and intimate care. Each perspective brings a different insight and highlights the asymmetric power relations relevant to the commercialized smart home, providing the opportunity to revisit what smartness could mean in the home setting.