“After a while talking about what cars people wanted to buy with a limited amount of money with my friend in front of my smart audio, my cell phone started to automatically send me advertisements about cars.” — Dexter, A smart home technology consumer

“Unfortunately, most [smart home] devices have little to no security, so I do my part. First and foremost, a device with a camera gets blocked (unless it’s a security camera). Then, each device that needs a network connection is placed on a segregated network that has no access to any other personal devices on the main network. Finally, all external internet access on that smart home network is blocked with a white list for devices that absolutely need internet. Another very simple but more important task is that I change every single device’s default username and password.”— Yohan, A software engineer for cyber-physical systems security and resilience

“The current state of security in smart home devices or even IoT devices is laughably lacking. I believe that there are plenty of easy things that can be done which will greatly boost security and privacy. Unfortunately, they are rarely implemented (usually out of laziness). There are also plenty of ways to increase privacy but I do not believe there is much interest in that as data sells for far more money than privacy does.”— Yohan, A software engineer for cyber-physical systems security and resilience