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Sign into your accountWhy a Smart Home is also a Danger Zone
January 31 2017
A most provocative talk about smart homes and the dangers of the IoT (Internet of Things) kicked-off the first Hacker Connect in New York City in January. Molly Sauter, a PhD candidate and Vanier Scholar from Montreal's McGill University, gave a presentation that scared the crap out of me when she dove into the dangers of today's smart home.
Now I've been a fan and even early adopter of affordable smart home tech: in the late 1980s, I had a wireless alarm system from Radio Shack and switches that allowed me to turn on lights with a remote. But that stuff turned out to be terribly unreliable.
More than a year ago, we outfitted our home with Amazon's Echo and Echo Dot and have been blissfully pleased. Great product, awesome interface and we're now dabbling in more ways to make our home smarter. I even wrote about Amazon's move into the smart home space after last year's homebuilder convention, since it was being largely ignored there ("Digital Dawn: Amazon is creating the smart house for the rest of us"). Fast forward one year later, and Alexa was the star of the most recent CES (Consumer Electronics Show), and a plethora of products at this year's International Builders Show touted ties to Alexa.
In fact, the popularity of Alexa is so pervasive – Amazon sold millions of units of its Echo and Echo Dot during the holiday – when Google introduced its competing product – Home – industry experts predicted that Google is simply too late to beat Amazon at this game ("Amazon's Echo is building a coffin that's custom-made for Google").