TED 2018: The smart home that spied on its owner

For two months in early 2018, technology journalist Kashmir Hill let innocent household items spy on her.

She had turned her one-bedroom apartment into a "smart home" and was measuring how much data was being collected by the firms that made the devices.

Her smart toothbrush betrayed when she had not brushed her teeth, her television revealed when she had spent the day bingeing on programmes, and her smart speaker spoke to the world's largest online retailer every day.

It was like living in a "commercial, surveillance state" with "not a single hour of digital silence", she said.

Ms Hill, who reports for the technology news website Gizmodo, gave a TED talk describing her experience.

Her colleague Surya Mattu had built a special wi-fi router to monitor the devices listening to her life. They found that she was giving away a lot of information.

"The Amazon Echo [a smart speaker] talked to Amazon servers every three minutes and the TV was sending information about every show we watched on Hulu, which was in turn shared with data brokers."

But perhaps more worrying than the data she could track, was the vast amount that she could not.