It's that time of
year again, CES 2014 is in full swing and as usual, the casual user
and enthusiast alike have things to be excited for. One of the more
interesting products discussed at CES this year was Samsung's new
“Smart Home” service. This new service will allow you to control
and monitor your home from anywhere via a single app. The service is
slated for launch sometime in the first part of this year will be
compatible with a variety of to-be-announced third party devices, and
will initially feature three key components: Device Control, Smart
Customer Service, and Home View.
Device control aims
to... well give you control of your devices, which is nothing
impressive, or is it? What makes Device control unique is the manner
in which you can control your devices; through a central application
on your smart TV, smart phone, or, God forbid, your smart watch.
According to Samsung you'll be able to control your appliances,
lighting, and who knows what else via a single application that spans
across all of Samsung's smart devices. One interesting feature of
this is the ability to give your house voice commands; you can
literally tell your house you're going to sleep and your house will
adjust lighting and such accordingly, which is pretty impressive.
Presumably the app will be fully customizable, so users can designate
any number of personalized presets.
Smart Customer
Service is a feature I found really interesting. Basically it syncs
all your devices to the central app and tells you whenever one of the
devices needs maintenance. Further it will also inform users when you
run low on “Consumables” (Food, drink, toiletries?). This is a
relatively simple feature, but super handy.
Home View, the
third feature of Smart Home will allow users access to cameras in
various devices in the their home. With this you will be able to
observe your home, live from anywhere in the world.
Smart Home is
indeed very innovative, but I for one am not going to be jumping on
the Internet of Things bandwagon any time soon. Call me old
fashioned, but I find it discomforting that a single application
could have so much power over literally everything I own. What if I
lose my phone or my smart watch, does that mean anyone who finds it
will have access to the control center for my entire home, and worse
yet, cameras that can be activated remotely. What's more, how do I
know that I'm the only person with access to my controls? What is the
government was to to subpena Samsung for access to those cameras or
the controls of my home? What's to stop some Fourteen-year-old
blackhat from hacking into my fridge?
Long story short,
I'm not going to be jumping at the chance to turn my house into an
all consuming Samsung botnet until I see some more information in the
coming weeks and months. I want to know what measures Samsung has
gone through to make Smart Home tamper proof; what they have done to
protect my home from outside interference, because while having full
control of your home from a single app is cool, having someone else
control your house from a single app is 100% less cool.~
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