Earlier this year, in The Hidden World of Corporate IoT Spying, I looked at how consumer gadgets quietly turn personal spaces into corporate data collection nodes: robot vacuums mapping living rooms for foreign servers, smart TVs cataloguing every frame you watch, and Eufy security cameras quietly beaming unencrypted thumbnails and facial identifiers to the cloud despite marketing slogans promising “local storage for your eyes only.”

Seven months later, that trajectory has only accelerated. The news cycle around domestic cameras and automated surveillance has moved from occasional security quirks to systemic betrayal.

In the first two posts of this series, we explored the risks of corporate-controlled IoT, from devices being turned into ‘bricks’ to the sustainability challenges facing ‘open-source alternatives’. But what if the bigger danger isn’t just that your smart device will stop working, but that it’s working all too well, just not for you? This post dives into the pervasive, built-in surveillance that has become a standard feature in so-called ‘smart’ devices.

The promise of the “smart home” was a future of convenience, efficiency, and seamless automation. We bought into the vision of light bulbs that dim with a voice command, thermostats that learn our habits, and security systems we can monitor from halfway across the world. But for a growing number of consumers, that dream is turning into a nightmare of expensive, useless hardware. The culprit? A business model built on centralised control and proprietary systems.