Some recent television series and films have made good (scary) use of the ways in which Smart Home technology may come back to haunt us (in some cases literally) TV series like "Mr. Robot", "Black Mirror" and "The Expanse" and movies like "Her" give us a glimpse of some of the worst case scenarios of technology in the home.

"Jarvis, remind me to develop a personality for you later."

Jarvis is the quintessential artificial intelligence of film ("Iron Man", "The Avengers"), and now Mark Zuckerberg has used his Stark-like fortunes to build his own. So is film invading your smart home or is it vice versa?

Still, another security threat presents itself. Adobe's "Photoshop of speech" software (not yet released) can manipulate an audio recording to include words and phrases, imitating the recorded voice. So, potentially, you could fool someone's smart home into not being so smart and opening its doors.

Amazon and Apple save voice data from Echo and Siri recordings; data which is supposed to help improve the tech and instead presents both a privacy question and a potential investigative tool. Police obtained a warrant for recordings from Amazon over a murder in 2015, involving an Echo that was found at the crime scene. The device had been triggered and was playing music; police hoped background noises would provide clues. Amazon declined to hand over the recordings, because users' queries to Alexa are protected under the First Amendment.

The future of the smart home

If these filmmakers aim to comment on anything, it's that you won't be able to escape the smart home. One day our very own Jarvis will leave the baby crib, go to university, then come back and take care of us.

"Sir, the more you struggle the more this is going to hurt."

Hit the link (but beware of spoilers if you haven't seen the aforementioned TV and Movies).

https://www.cnet.com/news/disturbing-lessons-of-the-smart-home-in-film-and-tv/

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