Privacy and power in the smart home: housing market conditions and exposure to smart devices in home environments

The diffusion of smart home technology is often studied through a lens of adoption, where preferences, attitudes, and inequalities in access and use are a key concern. In this article, we shift to a framework of exposure to smart home devices – which encompasses both proactive adoption and involuntary (or even undesired) exposure. We also distinguish between property-based smart devices that belong to homes and individual-based devices that belong to persons. Using data from a nationally representative survey of adults in the United States, we examine the role of household characteristics and housing market conditions in organizing exposure. We find that renters’ exposure to property-based smart devices is more responsive to new housing construction than homeowners’ exposure. We also find that Black exposure to property-based smart devices increases relative to white exposure as the level of Black–white segregation increases. Broadly, our findings highlight how individual exposure to smart devices is shaped by broader housing market dynamics, household conditions, and social inequalities that stem from structural conditions of power and inequality rather than individual preferences or attitudes about specific benefits or risks of technology.