6.8 Drawbacks of living in a smart home

One of the issues I thought about was privacy. How would the elderly or infirm feel about being monitored in their own homes? How would teenage children at home feel about being under the constant eye of their parents?

I also thought about security. Would it be possible for a hacker to break into my smart home network – possibly to disable intruder alarms and open doors to allow themselves entry? A malicious hacker might also alter control settings to cause havoc – turning devices on or off in a way that could put my home at risk, or increase my service charges.

Another concern about the technology is what happens if it goes wrong. In the case of a power failure there would need to be safeguards to ensure that I could manually override the controls without too much difficulty (for example I would need to be able to open the doors or windows) and ensure that my control settings were retained.