Smart Home Hubs: Helpful or Dangerous?
Do you own a smart home hub? If you do, chances are you have one of the three most popular hubs on the market. Apple, Google, and Amazon all have their own smart home hub product which gives people the ability to automate many tasks within their home. Many people say it is futurisitc and a wonderful convenience. For others, not so much. Ever since these devices hit the market, there have been a number of hacker security breaches putting their owners privacy in jeopardy. Such breaches have resulted in further investigation by local police departments and even the FBI. With the advent of the technology era the threshold between us and technology has been continously blurring. Some technologies have helped humans advance as a society but others were used to exploit society. Are devices like smart home hubs a wonderful convenience or are they a risk to our privacy and information?
As technology increasingly becomes more integrated in our daily lives, the threshold between humans and technology is becoming more blurred. Floridi (2010) expresses this idea in his book when he says “The digital is spilling over into the analogue and merging with it”. This gives rise to many different problems that we didn’t have to worry about before. By integrating technolgies like smart home hubs in your life, you are adding an additional platform in which you can communicate, work, and live. Smart home hubs have the capability of convienetly controlling features of your home by simple voice command. Even I have an Amazon echo, which I use for various things such as listening to music, podcasts, and even controlling my LED light strips. It is convinient indeed, but at what cost? I am always worrying in the back of my head that my Amazon echo is continously listening and registering the sounds and conversations around it. Having a smart home hub is fun until you realize you have an additional platform which makes your personal information and privacy vulnerable to intrusions.
All in all, smart home hubs are miraculous technologies, but they come at a cost. Although you want to take advantage of the futuristic capabilities that a smart hub has to offer, keep in mind the trade-off relationship with your personal information and privacy. It is interesting to think about how humans have advanced into making technologies that can offer capabilites that past generations only dreamed of. If these technologies expose us to new problems that we haven’t had to deal with before, the only thing to do is to come up with solutions that we haven’t though of before.
