<https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/mar/08/how-to-stop-your-smart-ho...> Everything in your smart home, from the lightbulbs to the thermostat, could be recording you or collecting data about you. What can you do to curb this intrusion? During an interview with the BBC last year, Google’s senior vice-president for devices and services, Rick Osterloh, pondered whether a homeowner should disclose the presence of smart home devices to guests. “I would, and do, when someone enters into my home,” he said. When your central heating thermostat asks for your phone number, your TV knows what you like to watch and hackers can install spyware in your home through a lightbulb security flaw, perhaps it’s time we all started taking smart home privacy issues more seriously. Just this week the National Cyber Security Centre issued a warning to owners of smart cameras and baby monitors to review their security settings. You can get a quick overview of privacy options for many smart home devices using the Mozilla “*privacy not included” guide; however if you’ve already invested in particular technology, all is not lost. A few configuration tweaks could help put you back in control when it comes to balancing device performance with data privacy (and they don’t involve wearing anything like the ludicrous-looking “bracelet of silence”, which jams smart device microphones, as recently demonstrated by a team from Chicago University). Is your smart TV watching as you watch telly? When the FBI, no less, warns users that their televisions could be listening to and watching them, maybe it’s time to reflect upon how dumb we are when it comes to smart TVs. Let’s face it, most of us buy a big TV with all the internet streaming and programme guide functionality we can afford and kick back in front of it. Beyond the initial tuning in of stations and maybe adjusting the colour to our taste, there’s not much configuration tweaking that goes on – which is a mistake when both privacy and security issues are in the picture. TVs nowadays connect to the internet, have web browsers, run apps, and can be controlled by your voice; automatic content recognition (ACR) watches what you see, from TV programmes to games, and the resulting data can target you for personalised advertising and produce viewing recommendations – often across various platforms. You probably agreed to ACR being used when you were setting up your new telly. To disable it – although this varies from TV to TV – head for the general or advanced settings and look for a “viewing information” or “viewing data” option. This will stop some “smart” things like recommendations, and even some voice activation functions, from working properly, so bear in mind that ACR data is anonymised before heading for the off button. Reduce the smart speaker ‘threat surface’ Smart speakers and digital assistants come in many guises; what they all have in common is that, by necessity, they are always listening. Recent research suggests that 59% of smart speaker users have privacy concerns, with unwanted listening and data collection being front and centre. Of course, only you can determine whether having a voice-controlled “Star Trek computer” in your home outweighs those privacy concerns. It is possible, however, to retain the smart performance while minimising the privacy “threat surface”. To prevent the Amazon Alexa or Google Assistant account holder from being able to view any requests you’ve made or questions you’ve asked, you can tell Alexa to “delete what I just said” and Google Assistant to “delete my last conversation”. This does require the account holder to have enabled the “delete by voice” option in their settings, though. If you are the account holder, you can use the “voice match” function for Google Assistant to prevent your results from being available to anyone who simply asks for them. You can manage how Amazon uses your data by opening the Alexa app and heading for Settings | Alexa Privacy and toggling the “help improve Amazon services” option off along with the “use messages to improve transcriptions” setting. Google Assistant users can use the Home app via Settings | More Settings | Your Data to pause collection of any more voice recordings. However, Google warns that this can “limit or disable” more personalised experiences across Google as a result. [...]