“What your smart devices know (and share) about you”

In “What your smart devices know (and share) about you” Kashmir Hill and Surya Mattu talk about how smart devices record and report data without most people knowing. Kashmir Hill claims, “one in six American adults now has a smart speaker” (Hill & Mattu).  Hill decided to install eighteen smart devices into her home, including her bed, to turn it into a smart home and see how much information the devices actually tracked.  Her home was not digitally silent for even an hour the entire time she had her smart home set up (Hill& Mattu).  This is kind of like how the mother had her daughter’s tracker turned on and open on her tablet the entire time she was growing up in “Arkangel”. The appliances in Kashmir’s home were sending information to her Internet service provider.  “An unprecedented amount of information is being gathered and stored by both private corporations and government agencies for the purpose of profiling consumers and citizens”(Dinev 2006).  Her TV was tracking exactly when and what she was watching, which is unsafe because, in the past, her TV company had to pay a settlement for selling very detailed information of its viewers to data brokers and advertisers (Hill & Mattu).  Her Amazon Echo “contacted its servers every three minutes, regardless of whether [she] was using it or not” (Hill &Mattu).  Hill explains that if a person buys a smart device, that even though he or she technically owns the device, the company it came from owns the data it records.  Smart toothbrushes, like the ones created by the company Beam, can record even how often a person brushes their teeth (Hill& Mattu).  Smart devices are basically used to target and profile the company’s customers.  This level of surveillance is unnecessary and frightening, exactly like in the mentioned episode of Black Mirror.