EXECUTIVE SUMMARY:

As technology has driven productivity, it has also nurtured our craving for convenience. But as more and more adoption of connected devices and apps takes place, we find our privacy–and potentially, security–chipped away. All of which creates more opportunities for hackers.

Analyst firm IDC expects Internet of Things (IoT) spending to reach $772.5 billion this year. The firm is also forecasting that consumer IoT spending will hit $62 billion in 2018. “The leading consumer use cases will be related to the smart home, including home automation, security, and smart appliances,” said Marcus Torchia, research director, Customer Insights & Analysis at IDC.

To experience firsthand the good, the bad, and the ugly of life in a smart home, Kashmir Hill from Gizmodo conducted an experiment. Teaming with her colleague Surya Mattu, who built a router to monitor the devices that were monitoring her, Hill delivers a tale both hilarious and cautionary at the same time.

Hill connected as many appliances and things to the internet as she could. Outside the obvious (an Amazon Echo), other devices included lights, coffee maker, baby monitor, toys, vacuum cleaner, TV, toothbrush, a photo frame, and her bed.

Reports Hill, “I installed internet-connected devices to serve me, but by making the otherwise inanimate objects of my home ‘smart’ and giving them internet-connected ‘brains,’ I was also giving them the ability to gather information about my home and the people in it. The company that sold me my internet-connected vacuum, for example, recently said that it collects a ‘rich map of the home‘ and plans to one day share it with Apple, Amazon, or Alphabet, the three companies that hope to dominate the smart home market. Once I made my home smart, what would it learn and whom would it tell?”

Get the full story at Gizmodo.