Smart-home tech is making our lives easier – but can we trust it?
- For better and for worse, our homes are turning into hubs of electronic intelligence
On the other side of the globe right now, the Canadian city of Toronto is readying itself to become the world’s tech laboratory. All eyes turned that way when Google’s sister company Sidewalk Labs announced a multimillion dollar plan to co-develop the world’s first city built from the “internet up”. The idea is to employ so many algorithms and sensors, and so much Big Data, that residents, visitors and workers need not worry about traffic jams, garbage pickup or shovelling snow (heated pavements, anyone?).
The cost of this, aside from taxpayer dollars, is relinquishing a good deal of control to unseen, unknown corporations that catalogue every single thing we do every day. It’s either the ultimate in convenience or George Orwell’s remarkably prescient novel, 1984, come to life.
The experiment in Toronto will tell us how much of our lives can truly be given up to code, but until that data can be examined and acted upon, we have plenty of smart tech around us already – from Netflix suggestions to home electronics and appliances all the way to home automation and security systems.
In Hong Kong, the Senior Citizen Home Safety Association’s pilot programme for smart tech for the elderly is up and running, using sensors and data to help seniors live independently without worrying about missing medications, slipping on wet floors or leaving the stove unattended.
The privacy that goes with control is among the issues Toronto is wrestling with, and digital security has been in the news almost every day in 2018. The more we embrace the internet of things (IoT), the more this is going to happen.
At this point in time, not all data is encrypted, and notifying consumers their data has been breached is only mandatory in Europe and Australia
But security concerns haven’t completely halted the progress, and our lives and homes continue to get smarter every day. According to Google Hong Kong’s second Smarter Digital City Whitepaper (2018), Hong Kong is well positioned to get smart should it choose to: communications infrastructure is open and inexpensive and mobile-phone penetration is high, but digital technology has yet to gain the foothold it has elsewhere in Asia.