Not Safe at Home: An Investigation of the Misuse of Smart Home Technologies as Tools for Cyberabuse.

• In Event: Domestic Technologies: Place, Person, Process – I

Abstract

Smart houses are lauded by the homebuilding industry for their new innovations, often using environmental efficiency themes to justify technologies which impede on personal privacy, and through their misuse, personal safety. With the marketing of smart homes as progress, we see the development of new socio-technical relationships in the homescape: Privacy is eroded, power is shifted, danger is redefined, and risks from the outside world may now be of less concern than those which manifest from within. Through networked technologies, one can terrorize another via integrated, remotely managed systems that can include door locks, ovens, heating/cooling, and video surveillance. Control and ownership of passwords, service accounts, even router credentials imbue the technologically savvy with new forms of domestic power over the technologically disadvantaged, and provide the potential to alter gendered, age, or role-based power dynamics, including the parent-child relationship. This paper investigates the status of smart home technologies and our theorization of them, specifically their use and abuse when the features designed to protect a household from outside risks are repurposed as a platform for cyberabuse within. This project uses a grounded theory approach, a content analysis methodology, and a purposive sample of media reports to describe, define, and theorize patterns of smart home cyberabuse over the last decade. Next, it reconciles data findings with current theory on the topic. Lastly, the paper inquires into the implications for democracy when government agents become the actors who repurpose smart home technology for state-sanctioned abuse.

Author

• Jessica Pardee, Rochester Institute Of Technology