With all the IoT devices flooding the market, advertisers are quick to claim that this is the year of the smart home. No longer will you need to manually toggle light bulbs, unlock the door with a key, or even keep tabs on the temperature of the steak on your grill: IoT can do it all.
But is this the truth, or is it simply a way to sell more product?
The Benefits of Smart Homes in 2019
It’s easy to see why people are claiming the IoT revolution is here. Not only are IoT devices, such as personal robots, flooding the market, but people are buying them as quickly as they’re released. Devices such as the Amazon Alexa have enjoyed a good amount of sales and find themselves in a lot of homes.
There are new IoT devices entering the market which provide a service that was once very hard to manually achieve, if not impossible. Take Nest, for instance, which can show you the camera feeds around your home and give you an image of the person pressing your doorbell, all of which is beamed to your smartphone. No matter where you are, you can be on top of your home’s security.
From smart bulbs to smart televisions, the world of IoT is full of devices trying to revolutionise the current norm. For the most part, they’re doing quite well; the devices being released don’t seem to be mostly snake oil. They do as they’re advertised, and while there have been some minor glitches in the past, it doesn’t feel like a market full of shams and false advertising.
The Drawbacks of Smart Homes in 2019
There is, however, one problem which I believe should be tackled before anyone decides to make their home smarter. While every niche has been covered by IoT devices, the topic of IoT security hasn’t been as well developed.
We’ve seen prior cases where smartwatches weren’t properly encrypting the user’s location, as well one instance where a Nest system was compromised by a white-hat hacker. These are just a few examples of how IoT has spread very wide but hasn’t taken the care to stop and build upward on what already exists.
As such, while it is very possible to turn your house into a smart home in 2019, there are some serious privacy and security concerns that come with it. Personally, I would not dream of entrusting the security of my own home to IoT devices until some standards are rolled out and it’s proven that the defense is enough to keep hackers at bay.
Is 2019 the Year of Smart Homes?
Smart homes have come a very long way, and there’s a lot of promise with the technology on display already. Unfortunately, as long as the security standards for IoT are vague, I don’t believe the budding tech enthusiast should kit out their home with smart gadgets just yet.
Fortunately, this problem hasn’t gone unnoticed in the tech world. With councils set up to oversee the world of IoT, it may not be long until we have safe and secure devices we can entrust our homes to.
Not a Smart Move
Smart homes sound exciting, but I advise anyone interested in them to hold off until the world of IoT gets safer. Only then can you entrust your own home to gadgets that handle very personal information about you.
Do you think 2019 is the year that smart homes take off? Let us know below.
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