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https://www.telegraph.co.uk/bills-and-utilities/gas-electric/one-million-smart-meters-currently-dumb-mode/

with a lack of communication, shared / privacy-preserving APIs these meters only work with their specific originating energy companies - there might be a usage screen that users can see (much like very early simple remote-screen meters) that at least allows the home owner to think 'oh, thats a little high, what can i turn off' but all the promises of the smart meter with additional controls, feedback etc are lost

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New vulnerability found in  Amazon and
Google Home speakers related to third-party apps

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This is an example of the social concerns with the internet of things. It is a great concern particularly in the context of the elderly because they might not be knowing what is going on.

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One of things not highlighted in the article regarding the Bates Murder case, is the debate whether devices such as ECHO or Alexa are "always listening", irrespective of the utterance of the 'Wake Word'.

It is counter-intuitive to suggest so, but upon thought such a possibility seems highly probable. This is so, as the Echo Device must be 'actively listening' to the sounds in its surroundings, in order to capture the wake-word to 'wake-up'

If this is the Modus Operandi, then it definitely constitutes as a violation of Privacy.

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https://www.dwell.com/article/9-smart-home-devices-for-aging-in-place-5528881a

An article about 9 Smart devices that should rende the ageing easier in a safer home. Basically from the article, it can be seen that very private data is being gather by the devices such as the place where the Internet connection is coming from, the monitoring of doors hence the people coming in and out of the house, etc… The misuse of these data can be huge as it concerns very specific and private data for an entire category of the population.

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https://www.theguardian.com/money/2017/jun/24/smart-meters-spying-collecting-private-data-french-british

This article describes the backlash in France against "Linky" - the smart meter installed by EDF, the electricity supplier. Opponents claim health and privacy issues, but the health issues have been ruled out by studies (and I'd want to check their methods etc).
Proponents state that the meters send only minimal data once per day, yet the article describes companies that claim to analyse the data and classify households. Such data would be a goldmine, from knowing when people cook (cookers are high usage), take showers, go on holiday, etc.
I wonder if there is a disconnect between what a smart meter connected app shows - details of usage etc - and what is sent from the meter.
You could imagine the electricity company offering discounts to people who were willing to allow their data to be sold on for analysis. It could be dressed up as "informing the customer", but those on tighter budgets may feel obliged to opt-in, sacrificing their privacy for the discount - only those who can afford it stay private.

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Most people do not trust IoT data gathering, usage or management. There are businesses who are making the case that people must learn to trust the IoT (and that they can help). However, the thing with IoT data is, it is essentially invisible, super massive and very very specific. To what extent is this use of data not about control and manipulation?

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This article highlights the multitude of ways a smart home can be at risk of abuse from cyber criminals, without leaving any trace of such activity.

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New Privacy and Security Threat from Smart Devices 

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New Privacy and Security Threat from Smart Devices 

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https://www.governmentcomputing.com/systems-software/news/university-of-liverpool-iot-devices-study
What this article mentions is really scary, in few words the combination of data gathered by all your smart home devices combined could configure most of your biometrics. It means that someone with dark purposes could use all your data including face recognition to access your accounts and personal information among others. One question is: Having just a smartphone means a big privacy risk?

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How Smart Home Systems & Tech Have Created A New Form Of Abuse

Designed to make life easy, web-connected devices are being used against women to harass, track, and even lock them in their own homes.

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Most people won't recognize her face or even know her name, but Chantel Nelson is a force to be reckoned with in Canada. She and a group of her peers are fighting an invisible war being waged on women across the country.

The Toronto-based social worker is on the front lines pushing back against technology-facilitated harassment known as smart abuse. The disturbing trend is a new form of domestic abuse that sees perpetrators use web-connected devices - like surveillance equipment, smart lights, and smart speakers - to hurt, harass, and intimidate spouses or partners inside the home.

"It's getting more and more prevalent," says Nelson. "Every day new [technology] comes out with new ways that make it easy to violate someone's privacy. People are using tools that weren't designed for stalking or tracking to abuse their victims." The victims, she adds, are more often than not women.

In the last two years that Nelson has worked at Interval House, a Toronto abuse shelter and crisis-counselling centre, she's seen several smart tech cases that could easily serve as the plot to a chilling Hollywood thriller. She's counselled victims whose partners slipped small geo-tracking devices into their clothes and others whose partners infiltrated, co-opted, and then locked them out of their social media accounts. She's even worked with women who found themselves trapped inside their own homes by smart security tools that were designed to keep out intruders, but instead allowed abusers to lock front doors and other escape routes with a push of a button.

The most notable story to hit headlines last year was about an American woman named Ferial Nijem, who says she was stalked and harassed by an abusive ex partner inside her own home. "In the middle of the night, I'm awoken, and my dogs are awoken, by this blaring music over the audio system. You have lights flickering on and off, TVs going on and off," she told the CBC about how technology was used against her.

As more connected devices for the home become widely available, experts say smart abuse cases will also rise - smart home device use is expected to grow by 60% by 2021 in Canada. Given that seven out of 10 victims of family violence in Canada are women and girls, it's not hard to see how dangerous the home could soon be for some women.

Since smart abuse is such a relatively new phenomenon, there aren't any reports tracking these cases in Canada. And many women are too intimidated to seek out help or find it hard to prove the smart devices in their home are being used against them. But that doesn't mean it's not happening behind closed doors, Nelson explains. In fact, smart abuse cases have become so common in recent years that Interval House now hosts regular sessions to teach women basic online privacy skills and how to spot digital tracking tools.

For Paulette Senior, president and CEO of the Canadian Women's Foundation, the rise of smart tech abuse is troubling, but not surprising: Abusers will use whatever tools they can to keep control over their victims, and smart tech allows them to do so when they're not in the home or if they're forced to leave. "I remember one woman living in a smart home where the equipment was used to control temperatures so it would be hot one minute and freezing the next," says Senior. "It was a nightmare and because the partner was the one that set up the system, he was the only one who knew the password to stop it."

Spreading the word about experiences like these is crucial. "I don't think we can try to combat or even start to track this problem without education first," says Senior. "We [need to] focus on sharing stories that talk about how technology is used against women so we can make women aware of it and know what signs to look out for."

For those experiencing harassment, Robertson suggests victims contact officials and document everything. Notice your smart thermostat refuses to work on the coldest days of the year? Write it down. Find your spouse showing up wherever you go? Write it down. Are your smart speakers blaring music every time you try to go to bed? Write it down.

Meanwhile online advocates are creating free, online resources for those in need. Last year, a team of tech researchers from University College London compiled a list of websites and online tool s that show users how to search for cyber-connected devices in their homes, disable devices by altering factory-setting privacy modes, turning off default geo-location tracking, and setting up two-factor identification.

Irene Poetranto knows first-hand how technology can negatively impact women's lives. The senior researcher at the University of Toronto-based Citizen Lab has been the victim of online harassment and even navigated the tricky legal world to find justice when it got out of hand.

While Canada has basic protections in place to help victims, more needs to be done, Poetranto says. Some of that work, she says, should fall on the shoulders of the companies that make the technology. "Someone who is in the process of creating their own application must work to create more inclusive spaces as well as take on the fact that there are people who are abused and harassed using technology."

If you or someone you know is the victim of domestic violence, including or smart abuse, Interval House can be reached at 1-888-293-5516. Interval House also offers a free-to-use platform that erases browser history and hides the organization's name from prying eyes. Please visit the Ending Violence Association of Canada to find a local hotline. In the event of an emergency, call 911.

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How Smart Home Systems & Tech Have Created A New Form Of Abuse

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Most people won't recognize her face or even know her name, but Chantel Nelson is a force to be reckoned with in Canada. She and a group of her peers are fighting an invisible war being waged on women across the country.

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Alexa for the elderly - a different approach?

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Alexa for the elderly - a different approach?

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https://storiicare.com/blog/alexa-for-seniors/ The below blog post outlines the benefits of using Alexa for patients with dementia, give the ease of use and the provision of basic information. Whereas there is no claim to replace the care that the individuals are getting from other sources, there is a pressing question to be posed related to the human-IoT interaction in cases of patients. Specifically, do the devices need to converse and provide information in different ways? Do we need the skills targeted to individual with particular mental health and neurological conditions to be developed by medical professionals? Are we comfortable that the usage is superficial/benign (asking about the weather or the time) or that patients start relying on the device more and more for their social interactions/companionship?

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Automation at home can extend the ability for seniors to stay in their homes rather than moving to assisted facilities, allowing them to keep their dignity and enjoy their retirement years. The usability of the interfaces to these devices is critical - if not adapted to the people with varying degrees of disabilities including failing eyesight and dexterity, they can create adverse effect on this vulnerable population. This population could be reluctant to be surrounded by automation and would require the ability to override it as well as more intuitive way to maintain security to eliminated vulnerabilities due to user forgetting to manage security features.

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I live in a country that was among the first to enshrine same-sex relationship rights.  This followed a long period of lobbying, protest and similar efforts to see a law change (it was previously illegal for me to enter same sex relationships but not women).  However, technically speaking, at the time the people who were seeking the change were breaking the law.  Fortunately, ethics triumphed over the letter of the law.  But I have to wonder what would have happened in an Alexa-type environment?  Would same-sex couples be legitimate, or would we still be handing down punishments on gay men?  The fact is that the ability to assemble in private, to generate, apply, and share resources in the name of a humanitarian change would have been deeply at risk.  Should the state have been willing (and we've our share of cases where our watchdogs crossed important lines) it would have had ample ways to identify the leaders in the thinking and the movement, as well as cast-iron legal proof of 'wrongdoing'.  A huge part of how we, as individuals, defines ourselves and seek to widen society's thinking in many respects requires some private 'incubation' space.  Inviting a wiretap into the home, arguably the last bastion of privacy,  has the potential to deal that a fatal blow.  Nothing could hasten the onset of a dystopian nightmare than the willing surrender of the privacy of the home.

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Smart Home, smart home: how safe will you really be in the house of the future?

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Smart Home, smart home: how safe will you really be in the house of the future?

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The case for smart homes for the elderly is that it enables them to stay in their home for longer, and may have the potential to save the NHS billions through preventative actions and monitoring, as most of us make heaviest use of the NHS in old age. However whether you’re tracking an individual inside or outside the home, you are still tracking them, and the sorts of data you’re likely to be tracking is highly sensitive, person data, which may impact on the dignity of that individual (toileting habits anyone?). The article outlines potential problems in that hacked data could let criminals know when an elderly person has gone to sleep, or worse, terrorists could remotely hack into heating systems and turn them all off in winter, causing death and devastation. Issues of consent amongst vulnerable people who may not understand the technology or know how to operate it safely are also concerns.

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The internet of things (IoT) has been marketed as a way of transforming the citizen from a slave to technology into its master. In a review published by the government last year, David Cameron wrote that IoT - the connection of almost every object to the internet - will make us healthier, more productive, comfortable and energy-efficient.

A popular perception of the smart home is one of unfettered domestic bliss replete with robot hoovers, automated locks and self-refilling fridges. But underlying the potential benefits is a series of concerns about privacy, cybersecurity, democracy and the fate of the individual in a world of connected sensors and 24/7 monitoring.

As the government's chief scientific adviser Sir Mark Walport wrote in the government review: "The internet of things could have a greater impact on society than the first digital revolution." The question is how does government ensure the impact is positive?

Sensors in the home and liability
NHS and internet of things: 'The future of care is about the patient taking control'
This week, Innovate UK opened bids for a £10m research fund for a business or city to build a demonstrator that exhibits the power of the internet of things in our towns and cities, across social care, transport and housing.

Care for older people is one advantage of IoT that Ed Vaizey, minister for culture, communications and creative industries, hones in on: "In terms of healthcare, obviously the internet of things can help people stay in their homes, which is really one of the most important issues when we speak to people about healthcare."

Smart heating systems, sensors that identify inactivity in the homes of older people and blood-pressure monitors that send data directly to hospitals are just three examples of a huge range of applications for IoT in the home that could save the country billions a year in energy and care costs.

The sensors trigger that 70 people are not well. You have only 10 ambulances. What do you do?

Maurizio Pilu, Digital Catapult

The environmental, social and economic advantages are clear, but delve a little deeper and the legal minefield uncovered by some of these innovations becomes apparent.

In the current system, the health, fire or police service are legally required to respond to 999 calls. Maurizio Pilu, director for research and development at the Digital Catapult, asks us to imagine a world in which a central emergency services unit records and responds to signals sent by sensors in the home. "The sensors trigger that 70 people are not well. You have only 10 ambulances. What do you do? In this case, does a sensor trigger qualify as a call? I would like my parents to have it but it poses an enormous problem on the other side."

It is the role of government to de-risk this kind of innovation, according to Pilu, who says the law is currently stifling progress. The government is also waiting on bids for teams to lead research into trust and security in IoT.

Cyber-security and privacy

The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) released a report earlier this year that found that 25bn devices are already connected to the internet and warned of the consequences for privacy and security. Echoing the FTC's warnings, HP recently found that the average IoT device has 25 security flaws. Meanwhile Julia Powles, a technology law and policy lawyer, recently wrote that the internet of things might prove to be the greatest mass surveillance infrastructure ever.

If terrorists switch off the heating of elderly people in the UK in the depths of winter, people will die

Derek McAuley

Derek McAuley, professor of digital economy at the University of Nottingham, warns that these concerns should be heeded: "When an elderly person's highly instrumented, monitored, internet of things home is hacked to the point that either burglars know when she's gone to bed, or worse, terrorists switch off the heating of elderly people in the UK in the depths of winter. If you do that, people will die. This is the cyberterrorism threat that actually deeply worries me and I know it worries other people in various agencies."

It is not the only threat a smart home could present. McAuley suggests that data gleaned from smart heating systems in rented housing could be extracted by landlords keen to cut their heating bill. Such data might seem harmless, but the way a house is heated provides a detailed map of how and when it is occupied - so your landlord could know your whereabouts.

One possibility is that the tech could be used by government to police the bedroom tax in council housing. The threat of the information being passed on to security services is more perturbing still. They are ideas that MP Vaizey vehemently rejects - but McAuley says it's up to academics, industry and government to preempt these scenarios and offset people's emotional response.

Access to data and regulation

Tim Berners-Lee, founder of the world wide web, says we are at a turning point in IoT's development, suggesting it all hangs on how the devices connect to each other. "I go to my doorknob with my phone and I press the open button," he says. "My phone talks to the cloud, owned by the lock company; the lock company talks to my front door and it opens. What's wrong with this picture? Centralisation has crept in there."

"I think we might have a revolution where people are demanding [privacy] back"

Tim Berners-Lee

Berners-Lee is working with a research group to build a system in which the consumer controls who accesses their data: "I think we might have a revolution where people are demanding it back."

But how does this personal control square with the challenge of managing demand for services at a national level, such as energy consumption? If government could monitor energy consumption in the home, it could step in to switch off appliances when they are not needed - improving energy efficiency, but at the cost of privacy.

McAuley offers an alternative: "There's another way of doing that - the network simply broadcasts the message that says 'I need to save some power, volunteers please' and the individual homes can make a random decision to switch off the freezer for five minutes. It doesn't need to be centrally controlled to have an effect."
Why the UK public sector is slow to adopt the internet of things
The government must set a framework for IoT in homes to unlock its potential in a way that remains decentralised, says McAuley. "Government can put in place a framework that says, 'Over the next 10 years we're going to put into building regulations a standard that says this is how future homes should be built. We're going to give you a five to 10-year warning. Industry, get your act together and define the standards.' It just needs to build the framework in which industry will do the right thing."

Vaizey agrees that specific standards should follow free innovation and experimentation: "We want to be technology-neutral. We don't want to set the template now about how the internet of things should work. That's partly what things like the demonstrators are about."

But he draws a red line under the sharing of identifiable data: "The principles are that you should own your data in so far as you can and any data that is shared is genuinely anonymous, and not just in the sense that it identifies you but there's no pattern that could identify you through data mining."

Whether such an assurance will be realised remains to be seen.
Topics Sign up for your free weekly Guardian Public Leaders newsletter with news and analysis sent direct to you every Thursday. Follow us on Twitter via @Guardianpublic

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Home, smart home: how safe will you really be in the house of the future?

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The internet of things (IoT) has been marketed as a way of transforming the citizen from a slave to technology into its master. In a review published by the government last year, David Cameron wrote that IoT - the connection of almost every object to the internet - will make us healthier, more productive, comfortable and energy-efficient.

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Customers surprised Nova Scotia Power upgraded meters without permission

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Customers surprised Nova Scotia Power upgraded meters without permission

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The data is on power usage in the residence and would likely be used by the power company to determine the amount to bill the resident.
The article states the power company would have acces to the data, but perhaps the resident may have access to it, or to a report about it, which may influence their usage pattern if favourable rates are availble during off-peak usage hours.  Perhaps in some countries there may be a backlash if the meters also allow power companies to control the amount of available electricity to avoid overusage that would strain the power source.  That would take control away from residents.

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Nova Scotia Power customers raise concerns about surprise meter upgrades

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Two customers lost power for hours after meters were upgraded

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https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200511-how-smart-home-devices-are-being-used-for-domestic-abuse

This is an interesting read and angle that I had never considered before. Basically it describes some cases where smart devices have been used to facilitate domestic abuse by making possible for abusers to snoop and control their victims lives. Obviously this is pretty alarming and even more so if you consider that individual domestic abuse could be extended to larger groups if such devices became compromised. Extortionists could hold entire communities to ransom by leveraging private information gained from smart home devices.

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Your loving "Nest" becomes everyones backdoor to your privacy.

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Your loving "Nest" becomes everyones backdoor to your privacy.

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https://eu.detroitnews.com/story/business/2019/02/12/smart-home-devices-like-nest-thermostat-hacked/39049903/

One can only assume that a home device owned by Google will be integrated to other sources of data Google uses in order to profile you... The data and metadata collected can be limitless, one might even worry that facial recognition is the next "cool" feature of devices like Nest cameras opening the route to yet more concerns for your and your loved ones privacy. In addition to the risks linked to data reaped "contractually", how about the data that is accessed by bad 3rd party actors? This article is chilling and I agree - as if straight our of a successful series.

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https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/oct/09/alexa-are-you-invading-my-privacy-the-dark-side-of-our-voice-assistants

I remember when I first signed up for Amazon, I would get great suggestions for books to buy based on what books I had already purchased. I thought this is great. Now, put something much more robust in your home listening to you and recording what you say for analysis. This article explores a few of the things that could go wrong.

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"However, that's where it gets worse. Amazon has actually hired a team of people around the world to analyze snippets of conversations that Echo devices secretly record and upload—without the user's consent or knowledge—to the cloud, claiming it will improve Alexa's "customer experience". Unfortunately, the data is not really being anonymized and can be traced back to the actual owner of the smart speaker." https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeanbaptiste/2019/05/16/why-amazon-alexa-is-always-listening-to-your-conversations-analysis/#41e84eb32378 --- We are the ones being hacked. Yes. Anonymity of conversations in the cloud should be stipulated in their company privacy policy, communicated to readers and give them a clear option for giving/or not giving consent. The consent part will take more details than would fit here, so please take this info as one that should be interpreted loosely. This is a good exercise btw.

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https://www.theguardian.com/money/2017/jun/24/smart-meters-spying-collecting-private-data-french-british

This smart meter backlash confused me initially, so I chose this question to research. In France there was backlash due to concern that they were to be used as a trojan horse, as it could tell when the user would be in a shower, cooking, in and out of the home, and therefore that data could be shared with telemarketing firms to time when is best to call.

This concern is not unfounded, with companies springing up which analyse the recorded data to create user profiles. Although the utility companies distributing the meters state that no data is being transmitted beyond what was normally recorded and it is not individualised, nor can it be sold on to third parties without the users knowledge.

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