NEW YORK (AP) – One day, finding an oven that just cooks food may be as tough as buying a TV that merely lets you change channels.
Internet-connected “smarts” are creeping into cars, refrigerators, thermostats, toys and just about everything else in your home. CES 2019, the gadget show opening Tuesday in Las Vegas, will showcase many of these products, including an oven that coordinates your recipes and a toilet that flushes with a voice command.
A woman demonstrates the Artemis smart mirror at the CareOS booth during CES Unveiled at CES International, Sunday, Jan. 6, 2019, in Las Vegas. The interactive mirror has video capture, virtual try-ons, facial and object recognition, and can give the user video instruction on specific makeup products, among other things. (AP Photo/John Locher)With every additional smart device in your home, companies are able to gather more details about your daily life. Some of that can be used to help advertisers target you – more precisely than they could with just the smartphone you carry.
“It’s decentralized surveillance,” said Jeff Chester, executive director for the Center for Digital Democracy, a Washington-based digital privacy advocate. “We’re living in a world where we’re tethered to some online service stealthily gathering our information.”
Yet consumers so far seem to be welcoming these devices. The research firm IDC projects that 1.3 billion smart devices will ship worldwide in 2022, twice as many as 2018.