Our research into the next generation of contextual smart home over the last 14+ years years has shown us that the smart home collects a vast amount of information in order to deliver its powerful features and associated benefits. Much of this data is highly sensitive and personal.
We quickly realised that privacy was going to be a major issue and designed and built our smart home to address this issue from the outset, with complete privacy in mind. It is designed upon the assumption that you own your smart home and all of the data that it captures, generates and stores. It will all be held securely in your home and none of it will be shared with third-party service providers unless you decide you want to do this.
Many of the current smart home solutions from the largest players in this space (Amazon, Google, Apple, Samsung, etc.) have been designed with cloud APIs and cloud services in mind, specifically to enable them to collect personal data and gain insight from how their products are being used. Whilst this is acceptable for simple services and features and is sometimes required to deliver services (much like cookies are used to deliver web-based services), it quickly becomes very intrusive.
As the services become more advanced, the set of data collected becomes much larger and the implications much more significant. What most users fail to understand is just how much can be inferred from this data. And the more data is made available, the more that can be inferred from it. Large amounts of data allow a wider data analysis techniques to be applied, more cross-referencing with other data sets and more big data analytics. The more data you give away, the bigger the privacy issues become.
For people trying to make spaces smart that are rented and used by other people (such as rental homes & apartments, student accommodation, sheltered housing and hotel rooms), privacy is going to be a major factor. You will need to get informed consent to share customer data with 3rd party service providers and know exactly what is being shared, who gets to see the data and where it is being hosted. Simply adding a voice assistant such as an Amazon Echo device for voice control of features could be an issue for some customers.
