Covid-19 and the accelerating smart home

Abstract

Home, digital technologies and data are intersecting in new ways as responses to the COVID-19 pandemic emerge. We consider the data practices associated with COVID-19 responses and their implications for housing and home through two overarching themes: the notion of home as a private space, and digital technology and surveillance in the home. We show that although home has never been private, the rapid adoption and acceptance of technologies in the home for quarantine, work and study, enabled by the pandemic, is rescripting privacy. The acceleration of technology adoption and surveillance in the home has implications for privacy and potential discrimination, and should be approached with a critical lens.

This article is a part of special theme on Viral Data. To see a full list of all articles in this special theme, please click here: https://journals.sagepub.com/page/bds/collections/viraldata

Home, digital technologies and data are intersecting in new ways as responses to the COVID-19 pandemic emerge. In this short piece we consider the data practices associated with COVID-19 responses and their implications for housing and home. We do so because advice to ‘stay at home’ is a key response to the coronavirus pandemic. Orders, regulations and encouragements to stay at home have been central to government policy worldwide, digitally signalled through various hashtags such as #stayhome and #stayhomesavelives. As a result, for much of 2020, working, studying and socialising at home has become the norm for more, if not most, households in the many parts of the world including Oceania, Asia and South East Asia and the global north. Digital infrastructures have been critical to staying at home. They act, variously, as conduit to the outside – work, family, education and indeed other people’s homes. Digital technologies, and the data they produce, are also mediating our ability to stay or leave home, or indeed to work from home. It is this digital mediation of staying at home that is the focus of this piece, with two overarching themes.

Our first theme is the notion of home as a private space, commonly used to denote that home is separate from the collective institutions of public life, notably those of the state and business (Blunt and Dowling, 2006). Indeed, the notion that home is a haven or sanctuary, a space that is inside, enclosed and safe(r) from disease transmission is one of the central planks of stay-at-home policies. In what follows, however, we continue a long tradition of ‘troubling’ home as private: ‘Home is not separated from public and political worlds but is constituted through them. The domestic is created through the extradomestic and vice versa’ (Dowling, 2012: 370). Privacy is dynamically created and negotiated in context, and we consider its ongoing constitution in the context of the pandemic.

Our second theme is digital technology and surveillance in the home. The home has never been a space devoid of surveillance (Blunt and Dowling, 2006). Digital technology’s amplification of surveillance has been observed as one of the more pernicious aspects of our increasingly ‘smart’ homes (Maalsen and Sadowski, 2019). While framed largely innocuously as improving domestic convenience, smart appliances and systems are connected to broader networks and institutions. For example, Maalsen and Sadowski (2019) show how the monitoring of consumption habits through smart appliances can be linked to insurance providers, variously impacting on premiums and discipling subjects in the process. By monitoring your behaviour in the home, insurers, utility and service providers can both penalise and incentivise desired behaviours. But the COVID-19 crisis is accelerating the rate at which digital technologies cross the threshold of our homes and is rescripting privacy in the process.

Here, we look at three ways the pandemic, digital technologies and data are rescripting housing, home and privacy. First, we illustrate how people’s ability to stay or move beyond home is mediated by apps which rate their infection status and monitors their movements. Second, we look at the way property technology (‘proptech’) companies have deliberately or tangentially used the pandemic as a platform to push more intrusive surveillance technologies into residential buildings, creating a pathway for further monitoring and sorting of tenants, and exacerbating discrimination. Third, we explore how the digital platforms that have enabled working and studying from home reframe the privacy of home.

Home confinement through contact tracing apps

Contact tracing, in which contacts of a known case of a disease are identified, contacted and isolated, is a standard public health response to infectious disease outbreaks designed to ‘break the chains of transmission of an infectious disease’ (WHO, 2020) and is being used as a method to control COVID-19 transmission. Contact tracing apps have become central to this process in many countries, including Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia, and, imminently, the United Kingdom. Numerous concerns around individual privacy and data have been raised around such apps, but also important are their implications for location and home. Worldwide, technological responses such as smartphone tracing apps are being used as a tool in the transition from lockdown and people’s ability to begin to move beyond the boundaries of their home.

In Hong Kong, airport arrivals are being given an electronic bracelet as part of the process of enforcing a two week at-home quarantine. The bracelet collects and shares details of a wearer’s location data via a smartphone app, using geofencing to monitor a person’s movements. Once the user has configured the linked devices to their home, any movement they make beyond their household perimeter will be detected and police and health authorities immediately notified (Patino, 2020). Penalties for breaking quarantine include fines, jail time and relocation to a quarantine facility if an individual is a repeat offender (Patino, 2020). In this case, technology is being used to enforce stay-at-home mandates directly determining an individual’s ability to leave home by allowing authorities access to their movement patterns.

Perhaps one of the biggest rollouts of stay-at-home mandates is in China, where the virus was originally detected. In the province of Hubei, by February, more than 50 million people were at home in quarantine and cities with seven million or more residents were similarly enacting strict stay-at-home lockdowns (Smith, 2020a). In many cities, only one person per household was allowed to venture outside to shop (Smith, 2020a). Physical measures of enforcing stay-at-home mandates, such as welding front doors shut, have been widely reported. With lockdown restrictions easing however, the ability to leave home is heavily dependent on a smart phone app. In China, the Health Code App, asks users to register by filling out an online questionnaire and then allocates them a colour-coded barcode or QR code which then permits or denies access to malls, office buildings, gyms and more based on whether you have the green light (allowed in) or red or amber (access denied) (Smith, 2020b). While not compulsory, it is effectively impossible to access anywhere other than your own home without it (Smith, 2020b). Movement is policed via the information the app gathers. The app shares data with police and those caught breaking quarantine (code red users) are tracked to their home where police tape is fastened across their front doors and neighbours requested to call a hotline if they observe people leaving the house (Naughton, 2020). The use of the app to trace and dictate people’s movements has been possible because it has been framed as responding to the threat the pandemic poses but there are concerns that the surveillance systems enacted now will be extended post-pandemic meaning heightened surveillance becomes part of the everyday.

Landlords and technologies of surveillance

The intensified use of digital surveillance apparent in the contact tracing and other apps discussed in our first example on the technologies and datafication of home confinement is paralleled in our second example: property technology’s remit in the residential real estate industry. Proptech has been increasingly embedded in the management of residential tenancies for some time, for example platforms such as :Different that streamline and automate the management of rented properties (see different.com.au), and ClickNotice which also automate the processes leading to eviction (Capps, 2020). The COVID-19 pandemic is providing an opportunity to accelerate tech adoption and increases surveillance and sorting of tenants using the threat to public health as justification. In the context of the pandemic, some practices and technologies are being pushed through without being contested as they would in normal circumstances. This further exacerbates the already existing power imbalance between landlords and their tenants and threatens to mediate access to home based on things other than the ability to pay rent (McElroy et al., 2020).

For example, facial recognition entry systems are being framed as a way to limit the spread of the virus by reducing the number of surfaces people need to touch. Bioconnect, a company that offers systems for facial recognition touchless access, has launched ‘Bioconnect Cares’ designed to reduce the spread of a second wave of the virus through touchless access enabled by biometric data (Bioconnect, 2020a). The company’s Biometric Access Control for Door Security, is ‘focused on letting the right people through the door’ (Bioconnect, 2020b). The ‘right people’ in the context of COVID-19 are those who are not infected, and Bioconnect and companies offering similar products are using the fear of infection and the unsubstantiated claims that their touchless access system can reduce the spread of the virus, as an argument to push landlords and property managers to install their systems: ‘The virus has the ability to infect through a single direct and non-direct touch, and without proper security, it’s very easy for someone who has the virus to enter a building and infect hundreds of previously healthy people’ (Bioconnect quoted in McElroy et al., 2020: n.p.).

To achieve this claim, however, the system would need access to a host of data and surveillance networks. As McElroy et al. (2020: n.p.) note, this is a vision ‘where a person’s body and biometric identifiers serve to make their health status legible to large proptech firms and the landlords they serve’. In practice this would potentially mean corporate access to real-time health records, potential integration with contact tracing systems and make scenarios such as providing health data as a condition of tenancy (McElroy et al., 2020). Control creep means that such practices could be normalised post crisis and discriminate and exacerbate the power imbalance between landlords and renters. Using public health as a vehicle to push through more surveillance is concerning when considering the potential ways they discriminate – technology and platforms have bias – and the effects it has on people’s ability to access housing.

Prior to the pandemic, moves to install facial recognition access in an apartment block in NYC had been met with considerable resistance. Tenants of Atlantic Plaza Towers, mobilised against the changes claiming that it is an unnecessary invasion of privacy and considering the already high level of surveillance in the building, a tactic not to improve their own safety but to encourage white residents to the neighbourhood as part of the process of gentrification (Durkin, 2019). There is concern that tenants’ biometric data and their associated movements would be shared with third parties including police and advertisers. Arguing that facial recognition was an intrusion on their privacy, the tenants successfully managed to force their landlord to reverse the decision to install the technology and are now advocating for a broader moratorium on facial recognition to allow a thorough consideration of appropriate future legislation (Gagne, 2019; Moran, 2020). The Atlantic Towers case illustrates the complex issues surrounding facial recognition as mediating access to housing, including bias, gentrification and over surveillance of minorities. Using the public health threat of COVID-19 to enable uncontested potential installation of such systems raises issues around discrimination and may impact on an individual’s ability to access and secure housing in the future.

Working and studying from home

Stay-at-home orders amplify the multiple meanings of home, especially for those able to maintain employment and education while at home. Home has long been a workplace, not just for domestic labour and the work of social reproduction (Blunt and Dowling, 2006), and for children and young adults, the affordances of home for study purposes are important, though often unacknowledged. The current pandemic uses new digital technologies to build upon these uses of home and in so doing exposes and reframes what is understood by private.

Working and studying from home have been made possible in 2020 through a number of digital applications – teleconferencing, learning management systems and digital proctoring (exam supervision) services. Many pre-dated the pandemic, but their documented use has soared over the past three months. Online conference facility Zoom, for example, saw a 500% increase in interest (Paul, 2020); rival Microsoft teams reported a 70% increase in active users (Warren, 2020). Once largely confined to dedicated distance-learning providers or specialist exam providers, digital exam supervision platforms such as Examity and ProctorU are being more widely adopted, with Examity named America’s fastest-growing EdTech company in 2019 (Chin, 2020). As university classrooms around the world shifted online, the use of these apps also expanded exponentially. Much has been written about the digital privacy elements of these conferencing and proctoring apps. While not denying the importance of these concerns, our focus here is their reframing of the privacy of home.

These apps make more apparent the porosity of home, exposing it simultaneously as a site of work and domestic activities. They visually situate home as work, as living rooms, bedrooms or studies, interruptions by children, pets, partners and the like, become visible as backgrounds to the person working. In so doing they provide extraordinary ‘public’ access to a most ‘private’ space; access that is ordinarily reserved for family, friends or invited visitors. These apps are, however, not beyond being hacked by users. Many meetings now involve the use of alternative visual backgrounds (art works, landscape scenes, even idealised home-study environments) to hide the domesticity of the person’s workplace or to present an idealised version of home. In this respect, long held notions of the home as private, and as an idealised representation of class and other identities, remain strong.

Exam proctoring apps, because of context in which they are used, have different relations to privacy, surveillance and idealised notions of home. Prior to the exam, the student is asked to show (through their computer’s camera) the digital proctor around their room to prove that there is no prohibited material being used. The proctor then asks permission to take control of the computer to monitor keystrokes, web browsers, etc. and then, just like an in-person exam supervisor, proceeds to watch the student for the duration of the exam. While students have an expectation of being watched while doing an exam, being watched while at home is more discomforting: ‘But students who have used Examity say it feels much weirder than proctoring with a professor or TA. They’re being watched closer up, by a stranger, and in a place more private than a classroom’ (Chin, 2020). In concept and experience, then, digital proctoring apps also draw attention to the porosity of home in practice and home as a site of education and digital surveillance.

Conclusion

The COVID-19 pandemic reinforces and digitally recalibrates home. Stay-at-home responses rely on a characterisation of the public sphere as dangerous and unpredictable and home as both a fortress and a sanctuary. We are able to stay at home because of digital technologies and the data they produce. The three examples above show how technology is not just helping us to quarantine, access, or work and study from home but it is amplifying the porosity of the boundaries of home. To stay at home we need to let other people in – government, authorities, employers, landlords – and digital technologies are the conduit through which this is done. As a result, reinforcing the divide and dangers between public and home has accelerated the integration and adoption of technologies within the home. The speed in which these technologies have been accepted and adopted is driven by the pandemic as people adjust their lives to lockdown but its rapidity also has implications for thoroughly thinking through their potential impacts.

As we adopt these technologies, we are giving more access to our personal lives and the data we generate. Technology is not politically neutral and the same technologies that are enabling our lockdown lives now could normalise the heightened surveillance and control creep post-pandemic. The effects of this will be experienced unevenly across housing tenure, gender, race and class. In normal circumstances, the increased digital surveillance and mediation of home would encounter more resistance and debate, processes necessary to thoroughly consider the discriminatory impacts. The acceleration of technology adoption, data production and surveillance during the COVID-19 pandemic needs a critical lens applied.