Being GUESTs in our own smart houses
Nikka Foroughi
06 April 2020
Society today is facing the question of whether convenience or privacy is more important, especially when it comes to our home life. A slight change has happened to how privacy is understood after AI (Artificial Intelligence) and automation comes to human life. As Kerry Cameron explains, “protecting privacy is a losing game both for individuals and for our legal system in these modern times” (2019). If this is applied to our home life, questions and concerns are raised. Has the convenience, provided by a smart device, gain greater importance over our privacy? Siri, Apple home pod, Alexa and Google home are the most well-known smart devices welcomed by people into their home life setting. These devices are obeying the owner’s commands when called by their name, like ‘Hey Siri!’. One does not need to turn off the bedroom’s light by abandoning the warmth of their living room’s couch since it is enough to say “Hey Siri” or “Alexa” and the miracle happens; The smart device will process the request with a swift response, ‘Sure, consider it done!’. The truth is that smart houses do bring convenience while taking away parts of our privacy by listening, monitoring and collecting our private information all the time.
The article “Home is where the chip is” by Patric Lucas Austin reveals that almost 63 million American homes or on a global scale, 55% of homes will qualify as smart-houses by 2022 (Austin, 43). This means in just two years, AI will become the main host of human houses as it is described in the author’s introduction part of the article;
“IT’S 6 A.M., AND THE ALARM CLOCK IS BUZZing earlier than usual. It’s not a malfunction: the smart clock scanned your schedule and adjusted because you’ve got that big presentation first thing in the morning. Your shower automatically turns on and warms to your preferred 103°F” (Austin, 43).
Therefore, Austin is expressing his concern that even though the households’ life has become more organized by living in the smart house, simple things, like waking up or the water temperature is not in their control anymore. In other words, Smart devices are the house host that control each part of the house. Besides, becoming a guest in our own homes means that we are giving our private information into the hands of the artificial intelligence that we do not know. A smart device that is not a friend nor a family member; but is a ‘stranger’ made out of complex coding that can be hacked by anybody anywhere (Walsh, 2019).
Moreover, Sonia Rao wrote in her article named “In today’s homes, consumers are willing to sacrifice privacy for convenience” that talking to smart devices like they are humans, allows them to listen to us all the time. She also mentioned that we have set up motion detectors in our homes; we have installed cameras. We speak to Google Home and Amazon Echoes as we would speak to actual humans and we have allowed them to listen to what we do in our daily lives (2018). This statement is also confirmed in the video “Amazon’s new smart homes: Privacy nightmare” with an in-depth analysis of a US homebuilder advertisement that promotes the next smart house generation controlled by Alexa (CBC News, 2018). Alexa is an AI system powered by Amazon that has the ability to listen to one’s family private conversations, as well (CBC News, 2018). Since we gave them permission to do this, it is necessary to know with whom our private conversations at home are being shared.
To understand why convenience is preferred by the smart house’s tenants over their privacy, one needs to know how ‘Smart Building’ is defined. Smart buildings (SB) are constructions that use automation to set the temperature, ventilation, and air conditioning; furthermore, it will turn on/off house lights and open/close house doors with the help of one’s own phone (Mazzara, 2019). Even though smart devices function can be controlled and changed, the irony is that we are being monitored by them all the time.
To further elaborate on why people are willing to sacrifice their privacy for the convenience of living in the smart house, I would like to share a personal story of how AI saved my house and belongings. It was a busy Monday afternoon and I was in a rush to get to a very important job interview. I was halfway to the destination when I realized I forgot to lock my home. If I did not have a smart house, I would have asked a family member to go and lock the door or I would have had to turn around, go back home and lock the house. Inevitably, it would have caused me to miss the interview. I could have been optimistic and convinced myself that no robbery would have happened while I was at a meeting. But having a smart lock called August, I can lock the door from anywhere using my phone, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth. This personal experience confirms my assumption that once someone is assisted by AI, and experiences the smart home living style, it becomes harder to go back to “regular home” ways of living. This means that when one is relying on smart devices, he/she is reluctant to live without the comfort they offer within the smart house setting. It takes precedence over one’s household privacy and ultimately it leads to the same privacy loss.
As an Interaction designer and architect, I am more prone to critical and ethical thinking when it comes to comfort delivered by AI and automation within the home context. In Architecture, it is essential to clarify the purpose of constructing a building, since the structure and planning depend on the design concept. For instance, if a building needs to provide a safe and private home for a family, security and privacy take the utmost importance (Kalvapalle, 2015). On the other hand, if the building is an office, privacy can be a second or third priority as the office is more of a public environment. But, AI and new technologies seem to destroy the purpose of what a building is being constructed for. In other words, technology in the office setting increases work efficiency (Gardner, 2019); within the house, the same system brings comfort at the expense of one’s privacy loss. In design, the boundary between work and home can be eliminated but, it needs to consider if that effect is desirable or beneficial. As an Interaction designer, it is important to solve problems when inventing new technologies. However, the new inventions can result in new problems that a designer needs to be aware of. Sonia Rao elaborates on what George Orwell said that is “people would lament and be depressed and oppressed by all these devices that can watch them and listen in“ (2018). For instance, smartphones made communication easier but have made people, who are obsessed with them, isolated (Renner, 2018). Similarly, Designers of smart devices are bringing changes to how homes are constructed nowadays. This means that smart devices have become “an integral part of the home” while “beforehand the technology was always an afterthought” (Austin, 47). Because of this interplay between Architecture and Interaction Design, the opportunity to choose between having a smart house or not will be erased in the near future.
Furthermore, Mathew Braga, CBC senior technology reporter, argues that manufacturing companies of smart devices are asking consent from their user when collecting data (CBC News, 2018). However, AI can also be hacked by a stranger and one’s privacy can be abused for money (Walsh, 2019). This is of great concern. As an Interaction Designer, I know that this consent is given by the user, but not by the guest coming to the smart house. For instance, the postman delivering a box has not given consent for the smart lock camera on one’s smart home to take a video of his or her face. This means that the postman’s physical privacy is lost. Thus, the critical question is to what extent this consent is ethical and acceptable (CBC News, 2018).
Mathew Braga claims that people are always willing to learn more about their life and habits (CBC news, 2018). This is one of the reasons why they let AI collect more and more information about them, so it can analyze their behaviour. Cyber technology has all of the intelligence that humans have gained since their existence. Thus, it is not a family member nor a close friend, but it still knows us more than anybody else. This means that Cyber technology is becoming the most trustworthy source of ourselves which can share our private information with a hacker or a smart device’s developer. For example, people will allow health sensors, found in their smart house’s bathrooms to collect urine samples so possible illnesses can be detected and drugs ordered on time (Austin, 47). Yes, that is how much humans are willing to trust this well-known ‘stranger’, AI.
In conclusion, humans need to decide what is considered private and what can be shared with the public. Thus, a decision needs to be made if they want to be a guest in their smart houses or remain the host in their so-called old-fashioned houses. I think it will be more beneficial for humanity to let the smart devices help but somehow take control of houses back from AI. Besides, a clear knowledge of who has access to the information collected by the smart devices, and what information is published, must be provided to the user by the manufacturer of the same smart devices. This will allow consumers to decide whether they want to live without automation using simple technologies or they prefer an ‘easy life’ created with the use of complex AI devices that can have control of their lives. Regardless of the decision, humans need to consider having a free room where they can go in and disconnect from IoT and the online world in order to have their full privacy (Austin, 46). Only this way a healthy dose of balance can be established between convenience and privacy.
Work cited
Scholarly Resource
Home Is Where the Chip Is. Austin, Patrick Lucas. “Home Is Where the Chip Is.” TIM
Magazine, vol. 194, no. 5, Aug. 2019, pp.42–47. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/
login.aspx? direct=true&AuthType=shib&db=a9h&AN=137701731&site=eds-
live&custid=s119 0300.
Mazzara, Manuel, et al. “A Reference Architecture for Smart and Software-Defined
Buildings.” 2019 IEEE International Conference on Smart Computing (SMARTCOMP),
2019, doi:10.1109/smartcomp.2019.00048.
Turing, Alan. Computing Machinery and Intelligence. Blackwell, 1950.
Visual Resource
Amazon’s new smart homes: Privacy nightmare? CBC News. “Amazon’s New Smart Homes:
Privacy Nightmare?” Youtube, May 2018, www.youtube.com/watch?v=ttrhmNU1GT0.
Articles
Molla, Rani. “People Say They Care about Privacy but They Continue to Buy Devices That
Can Spy on Them.” Vox, Vox, 13 May 2019, www.vox.com/recode
2019/5/13/18547235/ trust-smart-devices-privacy-security .
Rao, Sonia. “In Today’s Homes, Consumers Are Willing to Sacrifice Privacy for
Convenience.” The Washington Post, WP Company, 12 Sept. 2018,
Stark, Ben. “Are You My Worktwin?” The Outline, The Outline, 23 July 2019,
theoutline.com/post/7694/are-you-my-worktwin?zd=1&zi=kmc2upu6.
Kerry, Cameron F. “Why Protecting Privacy Is a Losing Game Today-and How to Change the
Game.” Brookings, Brookings, 25 Oct. 2019, www.brookings.edu/research/why-
protecting-privacy-is-a-losing-game-today-and-how-to-change-the-game/.
Walsh, Jonathan. “Ethical Hacker Shows Us How Easily Smart Devices Can Be Hacked and
Give Access to Your Personal Info.” WEWS, 21 Nov. 2019, www.news5cleveland.com/
news/local-news/investigations/ethical-hacker-shows-us-how-easily-smart-devices-can-
be-hacked-and-give-access-to-your-personal-info.
Kalvapalle, Rahul. “100 Examples of Privacy in Architecture.” TrendHunter.com, TREND
HUNTER Inc., 12 Mar. 2015, www.trendhunter.com/slideshow/privacy-in-architecture.
Gardner, Kevin. “How AI Is Helping Efficiency Improve.” Medium, Towards Data Science,
24 Oct. 2019, towardsdatascience.com/how-ai-is-helping-efficiency-
improve-98d0171a23e2.
Renner, Ben, et al. “Smartphone Addiction Increases Loneliness, Isolation; No Different
From Substance Abuse, Experts Say.” Study Finds, 20 Apr. 2018, www.studyfinds.org/
smartphone-addiction-loneliness-isolation-substance-abuse/.
Primary Research
Best Buy, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Best_Buy
Thanks to:
Robin Mitchell-Cranfield
Emily Carr University of Art and Design
Pictures
AI Pattern : https://blog.altair.com/workload-orchestration-is-key-for-artificial-intelligence-
machine-learning/
Background cover image : https://www.techradar.com/news/the-best-cheap-smart-home-
gadgets-of-2019
