A colleague of mine recently pointed me to a new show on CBC called Spark that started in the fall. All their shows are available via the web which is great.

I just finished the show Unseen connections: New ways that objects and poeple are linked.
Great show. They discuss RFID tags, how they work and examples of their uses today. Casinos use them in chips to stop forgery, how they can be used in consumer products and save information such as product lot number, when, where it was manufactured and other information that can be extracted.

Smart homes were discussed. In the interview they discussed up till recently the hold back to the adoption of smart homes has been compatibility. This has now been overcome by the Amigo Project, an open source project that is supported by most vendors. One of the issues currently being researched by this project is privacy. With your home all connected privacy is naturally a big concern. Lots of information can be generated by a smart homes and the devices in your home; what you purchase, how often you cook, what you watch, what items you take with you, prescription information. This type of personal information is valuable and wanted by marketing and research firms. Privacy is becoming one of the hottest issues on the internet and it only makes sense that this issue is of even more concern in your home as it becomes more and more connected to the outside world. I look forward to the results of their research. Although a smart home is something that really intrigues me, I worry about both security and privacy. If my thermostat was connected to my smart home for example, would it be possible for an external entity to keep tabs on what I set my thermostat temperature at? This doesn’t seem like a big deal, but it is one step towards government stepping in and legislating that we are forcing everyone to keep their dwellings at x degrees for the sake of the nation, betterment of the greater population, or something to that effect. You might think I am paranoid and spreading fear but this was tried recently (although unsuccessful).

Personally, I think any smart home should have an override for the home owner. A switch or detailed configuration screens where under no circumstances can data be extracted or removed without prior authorization — a default ‘deny’ on ingress and/or egress connections. No individual device should be able to override the master control of the house. Even the government should not be able to do it in any circumstance. On the positive side, the project is open-source so even if this is discovered to be possible, someone will patch it quickly.