Smart Homes May Be A Bright Idea, Just Not For The Dim Bulbs Who Live In 'em

Opinion Smart homes aren't smart. Simultaneously sinister and stupid, maybe, but not smart. We have been sold a pup, a nice shiny pup hyped as both miraculous and inevitable. It is neither. From the simplest appliance to the most sophisticated, they steal what they want and deny what we need.

Let's start with smart light bulbs. The light bulb is the oldest, the simplest and the most revolutionary electrical appliance ever invented. Plug it in, turn it on: let there be light. Smart light bulbs improve on this in just one way, you can sit back and say the words like God himself did back in the day instead of mashing the controls with your clod fingers like a peasant. Well, OK, why not? And you still just plug it in, right?

Nope. You have to download an app from a company you've never heard of, and create an account. You plug in your light bulb, and wait for it to start flashing like a maniac trying to attract landing aircraft. You "discover" it with the app, if you're lucky, then give the company you never heard of your home Wi-Fi password. Then, again with luck, you link the app to your home assistant. For your own sanity, you dare not ask why any of this is necessary.

That sanity will be lost three years later, when the bulb dies in spasms of flickering and you have to repeat all that with a new one. You haven't used the app in three years, but the password reminder process doesn't work. You try to delete everything and start again, but your smart home controller refuses to unlink from the old account while only discovering the ghosts of bulbs burned out long ago. You are stuck in a room with a migraine-inducing strobe, no diagnostics, multiple apps lying to you, and the gates holding back the madness are popping their bolts.

Ask me how I know. Ask me why I haven't dared to change my home automation Wi-Fi SSID password for a decade. Ask me these things only if you can handle a grown-up wailing like a lost child.

Moving on to the most sophisticated household appliance, the smart TV. Unlike the light bulb, lots of people have called TV dumb from the day it was invented, but that's cultural snobbery in the face of astonishing technology that extended human perception across time and space at the turn of a knob. Once again, you plugged it in, set it up, and it did what you wanted.

It all went wrong as George Orwell said of the telescreens in Nineteen Eighty-Four, when television went two-way. His telescreens could not be disconnected, pushed propaganda while watching everyone and feeding their behavior back to the Thought Police. Smart TVs demand connections, push adverts, and feed behavioral information by the megabyte back to data brokers and who knows where else. Nobody knew when or what the telescreens were watching, multiplying the crushing sense of lack of control that kept citizens powerless. There's the thing.

You can read how disturbingly prescient Orwell was with his technology, and how disturbingly cogent the latest report is about what's happening now – only if you're comfortable with the words "mushrooming" and "nightmare."

None of this is needed for a smart home. You don't need to send your Wi-Fi password anywhere, let alone mystery companies in totalitarian states – use Bluetooth to configure stuff locally. (Tip: the new Philips Hue bulbs do this. They’re hubless and app-less, and auto-pair with Alexa without snaffling secrets. Not that you'd know this from experts on YouTube or most retail sites.)

• Smart TVs are spying on everyone
• Future Roku TVs may inject tailored ads into anything and everything when you pause
• UK lays down fresh legislation banning crummy default device passwords
• Vast botnet hijacks smart TVs for prime-time cybercrime

That said, someone is paying to capture your security anyway. You don't need a network of privacy leeches to watch TV. It's all operating on the borderline of legality; how exactly does the right to repair work if your technology depends on a server you can't emulate that runs in a totalitarian state on the far side of the world?

Cars have emission standards and governments have mandated the sensors, protocols and agencies to monitor and control this. Consumer smart appliances could have their own connectivity rules, demanding disclosure and ways to check and control. There's no technical problem with that. It's even possible to envision a public or private service built around VPN techniques to report back to users who’s watching them and what can be done about it.

Until then, we will neither truly own the devices we buy, nor truly control the private spaces into which we pay to put them. We need to put our fingers back on the controls like peasants, just the revolting kind. Until that enlightened thinking catches on, though, makers of large screen TVs and LED light bulbs will be happy to keep us in the dark. ®