Standing in the Way of Control: A Call to Action to Prevent Abuse through Better Design of Smart Technologies

Smart home technologies, designed to make our lives easier by controlling our homes with the click of a button, can also be key drivers of inequity and abuse. In this paper, we use a series of case studies drawn from the literature, news media, from online forums to demonstrate how smart home technology can be used to monitor and control intimate partners (and by extension other family members). We demonstrate that the very features of these technologies that aford convenience are the same ones that facilitate monitoring, control and abuse. This is a departure from the existing HCI literature on abuse, which has predominantly focused on the use of mobile phones and social media, and addressed stalking, harassment and revenge pornography. We position the smart home as a mediator of coercive control and call on the HCI community to better understand this type of abuse and design technologies to prevent, rather than facilitate it.