For the tinkerer or early adapter, there are steps in the right direction. For the "everyday" person, this tech is still a few years away, in my opinion.
Let say you want to know if people are having less sex (well, it may come out from the search or browsing history but maybe not) and you want to use this information to target advertisements of services or products.
So how would you do that using cloud connected sensors?
Easiest method is to use CO2 sensor in the bedroom (assuming that this is the place where usually people do have sex). Rate of CO2 production is correlated with the rate of energy usage and spike in CO2 levels around certain time may mark people having higher bodily activities (and when located in the bedroom it usually means sex). Change in the frequency of these spikes may mean the change in the frequency of having sex. As ads do not have to be that precise, this is probably enough data.
Another method is to use a temperature sensor. As higher bodily activity would consume more energy, it should then rise the room temperature that could be detected with sensitive enough temperature sensor. This method is more evolved as the spikes in the temperature could be also caused by the rise in outside temperature or the temperature difference might be very small when windows are open, or may be caused by fall of temperature outside that heating system tries to over compensate.
But it is likely that there exists distinguishable change profile and it is likely possible to mitigate outside effects with additional sensors.
That is to say, there may be applications of sensing that benefit corporations financially, but don't help their users... Imagine an automaton that provokes couples into divorce though advertising, using sensed data (Instead of "You've got mail!" "you're having less sex!") as evidence.
This could be is also an answer to the question "what do I have to hide?". Well, everything as you do not want to be singled out.
I would assume that a candle would produce more or less constant output in heat and CO2 and you likely will light it before having sex and not in the middle of it.
I would also assume that two exercising humans will produce more output than a candle.
So it would produce some bump in the baseline but you still would have a measurable spike in it.
You could also distinguish the candle from the light bulb when you have CO2 reading.
Of course it would be also better if you could execute controlled tests i.e. you could control the heating and possibly the ventilation. As the temperature sensor in the room is usually in the form of thermostat then the first one would be viable.
A fireplace would deplete oxygen from the room but (unless one without exhaust) will not increase the room CO2 concentration. But it will likely introduce an additional airflow. So this would be more complicated case.
But you likely could trick the users in the configuration phase to give you additional information to make strange cases more explainable. I.e. you could ask such harmless question like do you have a fireplace.
I've worked helpdesk for users and being exposed to regular, everyday, computer users I can attest that the consumer doesn't know the difference because they don't care enough to learn.
One of my first questions was: "Did you try pressing the power button?" I would get silence....then a quick "Thank You" ... then a dead line.
Another anecdote: My mother is a programmer (DB2, Cobol, SQL) for a financial institution. She is of middle class in NYC and educated. She still uses an iPhone 3g and the iPad i got her for her birthday, three years ago, has been turned on exactly 5 times.
That's the everyday user...and you want her to automate a home?
And frankly, when I call help-desks, I play dumb, because it's easier then convincing them that yes, I did check that it was plugged in, yes, I did power cycle.
Your mother's lack of using her iPad is not an indication of her inability to figure out things outside of her wheelhouse, it's the lack of compelling use case for the iPad for certain people.
Home automation also lacks a compelling use case. But security does not. The reason securing consumer networks is so hard is not because "users are lusers", it's because security professionals have no idea about UX, UX professionals have no idea about security, and they both treat each other like shit.
I didn't work a help-desk for a bank or large corporation but for a hospitality group where I "touched" every user and store. I had a more intimate relationship with all of our staff because they depended on the technology which made us money.
>And frankly, when I call help-desks, I play dumb, because it's easier then convincing them that yes, I did check that it was plugged in, yes, I did power cycle.
This isn't an option in my job since if a Manager "played dumb" while their POS is down, its really their neck on the line. It was in the best interest of the user to have the system working as they earned bonuses on throughput and other metrics.
It seems that you're attempting to justify your previous points, until this:
>Home automation also lacks a compelling use case. But security does not. The reason securing consumer networks is so hard is not because "users are losers", it's because security professionals have no idea about UX, UX professionals have no idea about security, and they both treat each other like shit.
This is a great comment and I completely agree with you; between compelling use cases, complicated UI/UX, and initial investment of time to set it up, most people aren't tempted to enter this realm.
The most compelling use of simple automation are Android NFC stickers (http://www.amazon.com/NFC-tags-Writeable-Programmable-Money-...). I got them for my brother-in-law and he uses them to close his garage door or get weather in the morning, etc. simple and effective.
No. I want to automate mine. Here's a thing - every company tries to jump for the big market of "normal people" immediately. They got used to completely ignoring the tech-savvy with mobile tech over the last decade. So they fail making something compelling for regular users, and refuse to make something for techies.
Or, at least, that was the perception at the time. The company I worked for thought it meant they had to go after hotel installs. But that meant partnering with the devil himself, as we were just an engineering firm and didn't have any sales in house. It became a race to the bottom and we ended up spending an inordinate amount of time trying to fix issues with substandard hardware. Literally. There is a standard, and the hardware our sales and distribution partner was demanding we used did not meet it. We were no longer partners. They became our slave drivers.
I was happy the day I got fired. Apparently, we were supposed to be happy with our lack of progress and just show up to work for 80 hours a week and keep doing this forever. Apparently, I was too argumentative.
They're 12 years old now and still call themselves a startup.
There are plenty of resources for home automation, I posted this previously, and if you have an Android phone, this works really well for simple tasks: http://www.amazon.com/NFC-tags-Writeable-Programmable-Money-...
If you want more advanced home automation, RPi are great. I use one to control my auto-sprinkler for tomato plants when i'm away on Vacation, for example.
People have other stuff to worry about. They've got their own lives, their own jobs, their own hobbies. Things like LAN/WAN, VPNs, and SSH aren't important enough to make everybody have to learn them. Somebody needs to understand it, sure. But not everybody; it would just be a waste of time and effort.