Consumer Smart Homes: Where We Are and Where We Need to Go

Currently a variety of smart home systems are available from different vendors, who made different designs choices in how these systems operate, which in turn affect end users. A key question that we consider in this work is how these commercially available smart home systems differ in practice, what are the implications of those differences, and whether other design alternatives might be better. To answer these questions, we systematically evaluate seven popular smart homes and identify their underlying design choices around access control, privacy, and automation, and highlight the implications of those design choices for end users. We surface challenges and tensions for design choices around topics like security, privacy, usability, automation, and reliability, and we make design recommendations where possible. Our findings lay the groundwork for future research in this area.