From The Atlantic, Dec 16:
The Coming Commodification of Life at Home
As internet-connected devices and appliances accumulate, one academic foresees “the monetization of every move you make.”
“Imagine this,” says an advertising consultant named Barry Lowenthal. “I’m a smart toaster, and I’m collecting data on how many times the toaster is used.”Previously:
I’ve just asked Lowenthal what he, as an advertiser, would be able to do with data transmitted from an internet-connected appliance, and I happened to mention a toaster. He thought through the possibility of an appliance that can detect what it’s being asked to brown: “If I’m toasting rye bread, a bagel company might be interested in knowing that, because they can re-target that household with bagel advertising because they already know it’s a household that eats bread, toasts bread, is open to carbs. Maybe they would also be open to bagels. And then they can probably cross that with credit-card data and know that this is a household that hasn’t bought bagels in the last year. I mean, it’s going to be amazing, from a targeting perspective.”
The thought experiment I put to Lowenthal—the CEO of The Media Kitchen, an advertising consulting firm—wasn’t some far-off hypothetical. Over the past several years, the American home has seen a proliferation of “smart,” or internet-connected, devices and appliances. There are, of course, smart speakers (which roughly a quarter of American homes have) and smart thermostats, as well as smart thermometers, smart mattress covers, smart coffee makers, smart doorbells, and even, yes, smart toasters. After Amazon recently announced the release of a slew of products compatible with its Alexa voice assistant, including a smart microwave and a smart wall clock, an executive for the company said he could imagine “a future with thousands of devices like this.”
These thousands of devices, or even just hundreds or tens, would capture an unprecedented amount of data about domestic life. They present a possible future in which the experience of doing stuff at home converges with the experience of being online, in which a company can catalog people’s daily habits and present them with more of what it thinks they’ll like—the transformation of the home into just another tech platform.
Ellen Goodman, a law professor at Rutgers University who studies information-privacy law, expects that the data accumulated in smart homes will primarily be of interest not to advertisers like Lowenthal, but to the device makers. If the milk is running low in a smart fridge, maybe the manufacturer has a partnership with a grocery-delivery service that would make sure the dairy is replenished. Or perhaps an internet-connected sound system could beam back data that would help the device maker sell various accoutrements; electronic-music fans might be prime candidates for subwoofers.
Goodman sees a number of ways in which smart appliances could make the consumer’s life better. For one, because the devices are connected to the internet, their manufacturers could observe failures or glitches before a frustrated customer even notices them and calls for help. More broadly, companies could start to get a lot more visibility into how people use their stuff, which might help them improve their products in a way customers like.
But Goodman focused on two main dangers when considering homes full of internet-connected devices. The first was, as she puts it, “the monetization of every move you make.” In an environment where every sip of milk, every hour of TV watched, and every board game played could be used to try to sell you something else—to say nothing of the potential bombardment of hyper-specific ads—people’s behavior might change....MUCH MORE
"The Next Data Mine Is Your Bedroom" (GOOG)
