[Asdfbla]

It's all extraordinarily creepy because you expect your home to be the safe haven of privacy, but considering how ubiquitous smartphones are and how much of our lives already happens digitally, you could somewhat cynically argue that the privacy loss is comparatively small (because you have very little to begin with nowadays).

But if smart utilities take off, maybe some privacy label for consumers would be nice. Maybe in the future it's a selling point if when device is dumb as opposed to smart and connected. I also somewhat dislike the conclusion of the article that smart homes for everybody are inevitable or necessary. The utility, at least right now, of smart devices seems to be limited, so you don't have even to be a crazy hermit to boycott a smart home.

[jaclaz]

Off-topic, but not much, I always loved the results of the Biarritz experiments with video-phones (actually visio - phones).

How the device looked: http://www.rxcontrol.org/Visiophone/index.html

A good summing up of the results of the paper by Francis Jaur (1990) is here:

http://archive.li/Qe1Kl

Basically people soon understood that the thing has its use, but limited it to "public" areas of their home and to selected communications.