Who really has control of your smart home?

account. “But by the time I got to that point,” he said, “I figured out how to just do all the programming locally and not have it connect to the internet. So I didn’t really bother.”

The ability for others to control smart devices is “fairly implicit in the current design of many smart homes. It’s a feature, rather than a bug,” Woods said.

“Full control over one’s smart home is, at least in the present tense, an impossibility,” she said. “Part of that is because the whole purpose of a smart device is to give up control to someone or something.”

And then the darker side of smart living can emerge, with every nook and cranny of our domestic spaces filled with gadgets and gizmos.

Lindsey Song, a co-chair of the New York Cyber Abuse Task Force and the deputy director of Courtroom Advocates Project at Sanctuary for Families, said she’s observed an uptick in smart home devices being used in cases of domestic abuse.

“There’s been a rollout of so many different technologies in the homes that are really beneficial, but also extremely invasive. We constantly see this utilized against survivors whose abuser has left the home and yet the abuser is still connected to them in that way,” Song said. “They’re still able to access their devices, accounts and information.”

Shamima Ahmed, 40, was talking on the phone in her living room when she noticed a blinking red light on the ceiling. It was a security camera, one of several more she would discover, placed by her husband at the time. The court had placed an order of protection barring Ahmed’s husband, who physically and mentally abused her, from entering the home, but the cameras were his way of surveilling her from afar.

She felt acutely aware that every move she made could be tracked and that even when her abuser wasn’t home and was legally required to stay away, he still had a presence. “I felt like I couldn’t talk. I lived in my home like I was a prisoner,” said Ahmed, a hair and makeup artist in Queens.

Now divorced, Ahmed moved into a new home of her own, but the fear and feeling of being watched persist. At first, “I couldn’t sleep,” Ahmed said. “I still get panicked sometimes, and it took a while, but I told myself, ‘This is my house, this is my safe place.’ ”