“Imagine this,” says an advertising consultant named Barry Lowenthal. “I’m a smart toaster, and I’m collecting data on how many times the toaster is used.”I’ve just asked Lowenthal what he, as an advertiser, would be able to do with data transmitted from an internet-connected appliance, and I happened to mention a toaster. He thought through the possibility of an appliance that can detect what it’s being asked to brown: “If I’m toasting rye bread, a bagel company might be interested in knowing that, because they can re-target that household with bagel advertising because they already know it’s a household that eats bread, toasts bread, is open to carbs. Maybe they would also be open to bagels. And then they can probably cross that with credit-card data and know that this is a household that hasn’t bought bagels in the last year. I mean, it’s going to be amazing, from a targeting perspective.”The thought experiment I put to Lowenthal—the CEO of The Media Kitchen, an advertising consulting firm—wasn’t some far-off hypothetical. Over the past several years, the American home has seen a proliferation of “smart,” or internet-connected, devices and appliances. There are, of course, smart speakers (which roughly a quarter of American homes have) and smart thermostats , as well as smart thermometers smart doorbells , and even, yes, smart toasters . After Amazon recently announced the release of a slew of products compatible with its Alexa voice assistant, including a smart microwave and a smart wall clock, an executive for the company said he could imagine “a future with thousands of devices like this.”

Goodman sees a number of ways in which smart appliances could make the consumer’s life better. For one, because the devices are connected to the internet, their manufacturers could observe failures or glitches before a frustrated customer even notices them and calls for help. More broadly, companies could start to get a lot more visibility into how people use their stuff, which might help them improve their products in a way customers like.But Goodman focused on two main dangers when considering homes full of internet-connected devices. The first was, as she puts it, “the monetization of every move you make.” In an environment where every sip of milk, every hour of TV watched, and every board game played could be used to try to sell you something else—to say nothing of the potential bombardment of hyper-specific ads—people’s behavior might change. Maybe I want a glass of whiskey before going to bed, but I don’t want any systems logging it—would I pour one anyway? It’s not hard to imagine a “private drinking mode” or some sort of open-source app that could be used to conceal one’s true behavior from watchful devices.These systems could have a more active role in shaping behavior, too. Tech companies specialize in serving up things that are like the things people have preferred in the past, which generally means that “what we do, we get more of it,” Goodman says. “Can we imagine that in terms of our real-life behaviors in our home?” Even if the effects are salutary—maybe the smart showerhead learns its user’s preferred water temperature, or the smart fridge discourages its owner from eating junk food late at night—“I think there’s just a kind of compromise of one’s freedom, to have anything replicated, reified, reinforced in ways that you’re not choosing,” Goodman says. This is already happening with the media and entertainment that people encounter on YouTube or Spotify, but smart homes could transpose this dynamic into physical space.