My washing machine is spying on me and I couldn’t care less

Worried about what your home gadgets think of you? Concerned at what they’ll learn? Stop your first-world fretting, writes Jonathan Margolis. I like the internet knowing about me…

As someone who’s been observing and writing on technology for 30 years, I believe there’s a heck of a lot to fear from the exponential advance in online technology (AP)

Here is a list of the gadgets in our household which are probably spying on us round the clock, reporting on our comings and goings, preferences and prejudices to fascinated – I use the word ironically – analysts from Beijing to Silicon Valley.

Three smartphones, three laptops, an iPad, a Kindle, two smartwatches, two Amazon Alexa smart speakers, one Google smart speaker, a smart doorbell, a smart door lock, a smart TV, a security webcam, a set of smart bathroom scales, a connected smoke alarm, a Hive central heating control, an internet-connected air purifier, connected hifi speakers and record deck, air pollution meter, gas and electric smart meter, a wonderful Dyson desk light, and an Epson printer.

In addition, we have an extremely clever (I’m not prepared to say “smart” yet again) AEG washing machine, a Sage coffee maker and a combined microwave/air fryer, none of which as far as I know are connected to the internet, but I still think they sometimes look at me funny.

Here, then, is a list of my concerns and misgivings about having 30 devices I know of flooding our data back to base. That’s excluding the hundreds of websites and apps sucking us dry of information every minute of the day and night. Er, let me think about this for a moment. No, as far as I can think, I don’t have any anxieties at all about the steady stream of facts and figures leaking out of our little house and its electronics.

A Which? report published this week has pointed out that our household appliances are capturing and sharing private information with big tech companies like Google, Amazon, Facebook and TikTok, and that the firms and their business partners use the data to target people with advertising.

I say, big deal, as I’m sure it actually is – a multi-billion-dollar deal. I just don’t greatly care. Let me explain; I am not whatever the opposite is of a Luddite, which Chat GPT tells me is a techno-optimist – and is probably now telling the police, the council or the gas board that I’ve been asking impertinent questions.

As someone who’s been observing and writing on technology for 30 years, I believe there’s a heck of a lot to fear from the exponential advance in online technology. Perverts exploiting young people. The searing harm done to all generations by social media. Scams perpetrated on the naïve and non-savvy people, especially the elderly. The invidious position of those who can’t or won’t enter the online world. And let’s not even get started in this argument on artificial intelligence.

Yet this first-world fretting about Amazon knowing you like looking for pet food or that Bose speakers have somehow let Meta know you’re renovating your house – seriously, does it really matter?

And as a registered old fart, I find the worry about businesses knowing about our choices and dislikes more part of the self-important narcissism of the age than some kind of disaster. It’s quite amusing to me that people think their data is that important or interesting. Don’t flatter yourself, folks.

I’d go further. I like the internet knowing a bit about me. I get some great product recommendations from Facebook and Instagram. Some of them even work when I buy them.

And that smart doorbell is effectively doing the job of a local beat copper, of which we have precisely none in London. We were even able to use the Ring, in combination with the smart door lock, to answer a courier with an important package and open the front door for him – all while on a ship in mid-Atlantic.

So let’s have even more “intrusive” connected devices. A fridge of the type we’ve been promised almost as long as flying cars, which keeps track of when we need milk, or could alert me when that Mozzarella at the far back is approaching its eat-by date would be rather good, wouldn’t it? Even better if it could tell me if I’d eaten too much cheese that week.

There’s so often a flip side to counterbalance the relentless gloom of the techno-suspicious. Take CCTV cameras. We all worry about them, don’t we? Or do we? If I were accused of a crime I didn’t commit and could call on CCTV to show I wasn’t anywhere close to the scene, that would be a good thing by my reckoning.

On the other hand, I have to admit that if I were planning a crime I did intend to commit – say a robbery – would I do it in the presence of Alexa, Siri or any of their bat-eared colleagues? Or would I go into the garden?

I think maybe the garden.