Smarter and creepier: Internet-connected devices are creeping into just about everything in your home

A woman demonstrates the Artemis smart mirror at the CareOS booth during CES in Las Vegas.

One day, finding an oven that just cooks food may be as tough as buying a TV that merely lets you change channels.

Internet-connected "smarts" are creeping into cars, refrigerators, thermostats, toys and just about everything else in your home.

CES 2019, the gadget show opening on Tuesday in Las Vegas, will showcase many of these products, including an oven that coordinates your recipes and a toilet that flushes with a voice command.


With every additional smart device in your home, companies are able to gather more details about your daily life. Some of that can be used to help advertisers target you more precisely than they could with just the smartphone you carry.

'Stealthily gathering our information'

"It's decentralised surveillance," said Jeff Chester, executive director for the Center for Digital Democracy, a Washington-based digital privacy advocate.

 "We're living in a world where we're tethered to some online service stealthily gathering our information."

Yet consumers so far seem to be welcoming these devices. The research firm IDC projects that 1.3 billion smart devices will ship worldwide in 2022, twice as many as 2018.

Companies say they are building these products not for snooping but for convenience, although Amazon, Google and other partners enabling the intelligence can use the details they collect to customize their services and ads.