[Part III] Your House is Talking About You Behind Your Back

In Part I, iPhone as SPIME: Citizen As Sensor, I gave some background on the concept of the "spime", a technical concept for a device that documents its own position and surroundings in space and time. I also pointed out that if there is already such a thing as a spime, most people refer to it as a "cellphone" and they probably don't really know a whole lot about how it works, or what it can do, either for them... or to them.

In [Part II] Rewards v. Risks: Cellphone As Leash I digressed a bit into the history of a strange phenomenon of the modern age: people that e-mail other people to try to make them into dupes, lackeys, and minions. The odd thing is that almost nobody would fall for this on a telephone, and most people probably won't fall for it in e-mail, not anymore. But would they fall for it as SMS texts on their cellphone? I also provide some links to technology enabling "crowdsourcing" via the internet and SMS "texting".

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The House That Tweets might initially seem to be one of the stupidest things ever.

Well, in conjunction with the Real-Time Web, this all ties in nicely with the so-called Smart Grid, and the inevitable successor to the X10 standard for home automation.

Eventually, as part of the internet of Things, the power utilities can talk to your house and ask it if there's anything it can power down to help save energy for all of us. Hey, that's very Green, but your house needs to know how to tell whether or not it's really the power company tweeting it, and whether or not what it's going to power down is an unused "wall wart" cellphone recharger, or your elderly parent's respirator.

Malice, and security against it, are things you need to consider before you set your house to talking. Otherwise it might be turning off your grandma, telling people that nobody's home and burglars are welcome, and carefully letting your food go just bad enough to make you deathly ill but not smell rotten.

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More to come?

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