Building a smart home is a worthwhile project to transform your house into one that can adapt to how you live. Moving to another room? Have Home Assistant adjust heating controls on the fly depending on motion detection and temperature sensors. The lights could also be toggled to save power and precious seconds by flipping a few switches. To some, this is peak convenience, while others may laugh at how seemingly lazy one can become with the right smart home setup. In the hands of someone with a little know-how, it’s even possible to have a little fun with unsuspecting visitors.
While certainly smarter, your home could become a haunted house and not one configured for an annual festive holiday.
The ultimate possession
It’s no longer an obsession
We’re using technology more with each passing year. Your fridge can now track what’s stored within — and even show you some advertisements for good measure! In a world where we’re glued to 5-inch screens that can be crammed inside our pockets, kitting out the home with smart Internet of Things (IoT) hardware is one way to make your home adapt to how you move around and interact with not only appliances and other devices, but also each other. It can be exciting to install your own custom lighting solution and sensors, but this can all lead to something rather terrifying.
Horror stories typically revolve around creaking floorboards and cold spots in the hallway. The Conjuring is one of my favorite horror movies, and it’s peak cinema with the 70s vibe, ghost-busting equipment, and some excellent jump scares. But how would one adapt this movie to a 2020s household? We’ve seen some attempts with Margaux and Afraid, which both represent just how wrong things can go when artificial intelligence decides to go off script and start a new hobby. Even actress Megan Fox got into the spirit with the rather terrible Subservience.
We’d have to provide each spirit, ghost, and demonic presence with an IP address.
Essentially, we’d have to provide each spirit, ghost, and demonic presence with an IP address. And each one of these could be appropriated to any number of IoT devices. Smart plugs are ghosts in that they’re largely invisible in the grand scheme of smart home stuff, but have a noticeable impact by controlling anything connected through them. We’ve then got thermostats that learn habits and routines, speakers that constantly listen for our voices (even while muted — hello, Alexa!), and fridges that tell us when to head to the shops.
iRobot was an excellent movie that showed how a reliance on technology could lead to our downfall. I’m sure you’ve seen The Terminator series too. Our homes, once refuges of privacy in this era of self-hosting, are secretly becoming ecosystems of interconnected machines. We’re creating our own local network hubs of hardware with self-hosted large language models (LLMs) and a whole manner of other services. Sure, everything is designed to obey the user, but when they encounter a bug or simply misbehave, it can sometimes feel supernatural.
Too many unknowns
Even if you’re tech-savvy
An interesting point raised in a BBC article by Aleks Krotoski quoted renowned speaker and PhD student Tobias Revel, “That simple question is so revealing of so many of the problems we have in our relationship with technology. We at once express our lack of technical understanding of how the thing works, but we also put agency and responsibility into the thing. We assume that the thing is somehow responsible for the misfortune you are now experiencing.” That single quote hit the nail on the head. We rely on technology but know very little about how it all works.
We cover many topics here at XDA, including networking, self-hosting, PC building, and everything else in between, but there are still so many puzzle pieces that we simply do not have the time to understand. I’ll be setting up the new home with a fully connected wired LAN between the detached garage, house, and office outbuilding using a combination of fibre, some network switches, and a few meters of conduit. I enjoy messing around with technology and have been doing so for nearly three decades, but it’s a continuous learning process.
We at once express our lack of technical understanding for how the thing works, but we also put agency and responsibility into the thing.
It’s also how I view those who are less tech-savvy than you or I. Take a family relative, I assist with their tablet. They don’t fully understand how everything works inside the device they’re holding, but they’re fully aware it performs similarly to their smartphone. That’s the extent of their technical know-how. That said, they place so much agency on the tablet, working as intended by the manufacturer. Should something go wrong, it’s an immediate call to my phone, but this rare occurrence usually involves Google requiring them to sign in again or an app needing an update.
Now, that’s an extreme case, but many people are somewhere in between. They’re not quite up to speed with what MT/s means for memory speed, but they could configure a smart home with a robot vacuum cleaner, some bulbs, smart plugs, and a Raspberry Pi running Home Assistant. Once you get into automations and AI, things can get a little wonky, depending on the hardware used, firmware deployed, and software to control everything. Home Assistant is largely dependable for automating everything, but even I’ve noticed some times where things make me question what just occurred.
If you have enough free time and wish to purchase a few sensors, it’s possible to completely transform almost everything inside your home, from “dumb” recliner chairs to smart lighting that aids you through the night. But it’s not all sunshine and rainbows. Fading out smart bulbs that don’t support this function? Prepare yourself for some wacky results, including random flickering. Motion sensors are another amusing yet outright infuriating experience at times. Mostly, they work as expected, but you can often find times when you’re moving limbs like a possessed doll to see what’s in front of you, depending on how everything has been configured.
Demonic malware presence
We’ve detected some anomaly
We’ve gone from clunky beige beasts of the 1980s to integrated systems inside just about everything we purchase and own today. Your vehicle has an infotainment system, an electronic control unit (ECU), and other bits and pieces that make a modern car considerably more efficient, comfortable, and capable than previous generations. Even your doorbell has a camera now, which can be connected to from anywhere in the world, so long as Amazon’s infrastructure remains up and running. Should any of these encounter an issue, we could perceive it as some form of haunting.
Generations ago, people would classify symptoms and other disturbances as evidence of paranormal activity, yet today we would laugh it off, knowing precisely what causes these anthropomorphizations — but regardless of how much more advance we are now as a species, we’re still guilty of viewing bad code, breaches, phishing emails, or even dodgy firmware as something other than what it a actually is. It’s human nature to project intention even where there is none, allowing our wireless networks to be transformed into an electronic form of ectoplasm.
It’s human nature to project intention even where there is none, allowing our wireless networks to be transformed into an electronic form of ectoplasm.
Circling back to how we depend on technology, we place so much trust in not only the physical hardware we interact with daily, but also all the code that comes along with it. Companies are trusted to securely store our data on their servers and protect it all against malicious parties, but we’ve seen breaches happen, and in a world where “password123” is still used for credentials, it shouldn’t come as a surprise. That could have unforeseen consequences for the smart home, especially if it’s not protected. You could open the door to someone being able to alter automation or even control your devices.
Then there’s firmware that can change how these IoT devices function. This alone could cause troubled instances where you expect something to happen, yet it does something else. Without fully understanding the reason why, we’d put it down to either a glitch in the Matrix or Agent Smith aggressively taking full control over your smart home. Much like early access games, we’re almost like beta testers for these products and services, which evolve around our usage patterns, habits, feature requests, and other collected telemetry data you thought you disabled.
You could build your own IoT hardware to better understand how everything interconnects, but that’s not for everyone.
It’s only going to worsen
We keep buying more and more
The smart home can be quite the feat of planning. When done right, you can create the ultimate platform of convenience and functionality, improving your well-being and making your home a better place to reside. But there are plenty of hurdles in the way of this goal, and while the ghost in a smart home may not be supernatural but systemic, we must remain vigilant in keeping everything secure, updated, and closed. Smart technology is built on networks of control and data extraction, many times without our say or knowledge.
Think about it. Your washing machine likely communicates with some data center in another country to “call home” and provide functionality for an app to control when the machine cycle commences. Is that worth the external connection, potential gateway of attack, and reliance on a manufacturer to not abuse its position of power over your device and data? It’s why we promote a healthy use of self-hosting and segmentation. Keep all your IoT hardware in their own containerized portion of the LAN, much like you would house guests with Wi-Fi.
Keep all your IoT hardware in their own containerized portion of the LAN, much like you would house guests with Wi-Fi.
For the ultimate electronic ghostception, you could ask Alexa (or your favorite smart assistant) to tell you a spooky ghost story. You’re communicating with someone who doesn’t exist, asking that individual to relay to you a pre-programmed response, likely pulling information from some online source. If we were to explain this to someone a century ago, they would think we were at best slightly strange or at worst haunted. It’s similar to how I’ve had issues with my vehicle where the infotainment bugs out and fires up the air conditioning to full blast as it fails to fully boot one of the saved user profiles.
Sitting in a shopping centre car park at sub-zero temperatures with air con blasting in your face is no fun while you attempt to cycle power and try everything to battle the demonic presence that is terrible Volkswagen code. In the end, we had to vacate the vehicle and attempt to lock, unlock, lock, unlock, and try again. Eventually, we were up and running again, but something similar could occur with smart home equipment, which doesn’t have the best reputation for reliability, especially from lesser-known brands.
Build smart, not because you can
I don’t wish to scare you away from building a smart home. It’s a fantastic endeavor and one I encourage everyone to attempt, but it’s important to plan and consider all angles when adding more technology to your home. I feel like it’s too easy for us to purchase new gadgets without fully understanding what comes with this new acquisition. If you’ve played (or watched) the Five Nights at Freddy’s series of games, I think of it similarly to how you needed to choose whether to take in or trash the haunted animatronic animals.
