The Leaky Home: Conceptualizing the Remote Control of Smart Technologies in the Domestic Sphere

Abstract

Today many homes are accessible from afar, with mobile phones functioning as remote controls for technologies within the home. In this article we propose the ‘leaky home’ as a conceptual figure to understand how automated homes that leak through connected devices and sensors that collect, transmit, receive and share data are experienced and sensed by bodies within these distributed spaces. The leak brings together postmodern metaphors of fluidity and the 21st century discourse of information leaks, while maintaining infrastructural connotations of substances that shift domain in very tangible ways. By looking at a series of examples from media accounts and research conducted in Denmark, the UK, the USA and Australia, ranging from everyday family practices to digital coercive control, we explore how the care-control complex of the home is impacted by its leaky nature.

Keywords

control home Internet of Things (IoT)leaks

Introduction

Inside your home, multiple smart devices are installed for convenience and control. When you are away from home, the smart speaker is accessed remotely through an app on your smartphone. So is the log of the interactive assistant, which shows all its interactions – questions asked, and responses given. You can access smart lighting and thermostats conveniently on the go if you want the lights or temperature to be adjusted. Real-time notifications are sent to your smartphone whenever someone enters a room or opens a window. The smart surveillance system provides daily recaps of all activities, available in short time-lapse videos, and you can search for specific activities using natural language or by typing into a search field, as if you’re Googling your own home. In this way the home emerges as a vibrating field of information flows. The home is present in numerous places at once. It seeps and leaks into its surroundings. Reverberating in 5G antennas. Hovering as a delayed notification on your phone. Registering. Recording. Revealing. Home is where the heart is. Control is wherever the Wi-Fi works.

This article seeks to understand the experience and bodily sensation of domestic settings such as the one presented in this prologue (Lykke, 2014; Søilen, 2021). We propose the concept of the ‘leaky home’¹ as a way to theorize the home as an increasingly distributed entity thanks to the rise of the Internet of Things (IoT). The home integrates more and more smart technologies and digital devices that can be accessed remotely via smartphones, often by multiple members of the household. Numbers of IoT devices are currently surging across the globe, including internet-connected locks, interactive assistants with video and audio recording, surveillance systems, and sensors that chart humidity, heat and light, as well as Wi-Fi-enabled ovens, dishwashers and refrigerators. They are all characterized by their ability to connect and communicate with each other, and the growing market for smart home technologies has now reached a point where they are sometimes built into new houses before anyone even moves in (Aagaard, 2023). The marketing of these devices foregrounds convenience and safety. However, recent studies also reveal the use of smart technologies in intimate partner violence (Lopez-Neira et al., 2019). The ability to control these technologies remotely not only provides new tools for safety and care, but also offers affordances for surveillance, control, and attacks on victims’ perceptions such as flickering lights, locking doors, and blaring music that wakes them at night (Bowles, 2018; Small, 2019). Such embodied experiences call for a critical engagement with how the pervasiveness of connected technologies is reconfiguring the relationship between people, technologies and the home. In this article we explore the spectrum of uses of technologies in the domestic sphere, ranging from the caring to the abusive. We ask: how does the integration of IoT technologies rearticulate the home as a site of control? We argue that the notion of leakiness provides a spatial and temporal figure to address the intangibilities of the relationship between home, technology and control which can advance our understanding of the experience of the home as a space that is not bounded, contained and static, but rather decentred and distributed, with no clear boundaries between private and public, work and leisure – or, crucially, safe and unsafe (Harris, 2018).

In what follows, we first place our discussion of the distributed home in historical context, emphasising that the home’s ambivalence between care and control existed long before the advent of smart technologies. Nevertheless, the porosity of the smart home calls for new ways to conceptualize that ambivalence, and in the subsequent section we unfold the concept of ‘leakiness’. The connotations of the leak capture the ways in which the technology-saturated home is dispersed and immaterial on one hand, but at the same time deeply material, situated and sticky on the other. Moreover, we demonstrate a shift in understanding: from being something that upsets a system, the leak now is the system. This makes the concept especially apt to grasp how the temporal and spatial qualities of the smart home create specific affordances for the complex intermingling of care and control. Drawing on examples from media accounts and research conducted in Denmark, the UK, the USA and Australia, we exemplify how connected technologies enable new articulations of control, both within the home and domestic life and beyond them. In this way we demonstrate how the conceptual figure of the leaky home can advance our understanding of what is at work in such cases. In particular, we foreground the importance of the intensity, weight and visceral sensation of control that we sought to capture in more poetic terms in the opening to our introduction.

The Ambivalent Home and its Porous Walls

Two stories of intimate partner abuse during the pandemic provide a useful entry point into the home’s leaky qualities (Silva and Franco, 2020). In both cases – as reported by the BBC – IoT technologies played a prominent part in the abuse tactics employed. In the first case, the victim reported that her husband had monitored her via an Amazon Ring video doorbell installed in their home. The Ring doorbell provides remote access to live footage and recordings, sending motion detection alerts and notifications to users through their smartphones. Her partner threatened her by saying that if she disabled the Ring doorbell, she would be compromising the safety of their children. In the second case, the abuser used the ‘drop-in’ function of the Amazon virtual assistant Alexa to access their home remotely, listening to and even addressing the woman through the many smart speakers and Alexa devices installed throughout their home. In this case, the partner had been responsible for setting up the accounts and installing the technology. The woman reported that one feature that had intensified the control was ‘family-sharing’, a function that is an increasingly normalized part of everyday ‘digital parenting’ and family care practices (Mavoa et al., 2023). Referring to the extended forms of domestic control afforded by connected technologies, this victim said: ‘We are all in this bubble in the house. Even when I leave, he can see my location through my [smart]watch, or my phone or my iPad or anything’ (Silva and Franco, 2020). Notably, a ‘bubble’ is something that can both be seen as protecting, but also confining. A bubble is often lightweight and ephemeral. It speaks to how intimate partner violence becomes increasingly spaceless as monitoring and control from a distance intensify through the affordances of digital technologies (Harris and Woodlock, 2019; Leitão, 2021). These two accounts highlight how the integration of increasingly sophisticated IoT technologies into the home are located on a threshold between care and control, and how technologies foregrounding video and audiovisual surveillance manifest as visceral, bodily experiences.

However, it is important to recognize that the ambivalence of the home and its porosity did not simply arrive with the advent of smart technologies. Situating the notion of the home in its cultural historical context will enable us to more clearly identify the special properties of the digitized home and argue for the usefulness of the leak as a figure. When we look at the home from a historical and cultural perspective, we see that it has been a multifunctional space, and that for large parts of human history, a home has been a dwelling place for more people than those directly related by family ties (Madanipour, 2003). Moreover, changes in technology, economy, politics, and social norms may contribute to changing the conditions and use of the home (Steiner and Veel, 2017). For instance, industrialization pushed further in the direction of regarding the home as a space of leisure and privacy, as workers sought refuge from the demands of the factory and the city. The design of the home changed accordingly, with separate rooms for different functions and a greater emphasis on comfort and convenience (Ariès and Duby, 1992–1998). Notions of the home as a sheltered space of privacy have intimate ties to bourgeois ideas of homeliness and the emergence of liberal democracy (Habermas, 1989; Koops, 2018). Philosophers throughout the 20th century have explored the home as a site of dwelling, shelter and protection (Bachelard, 1964; Heidegger, 1971), but also of alienation and ambivalence (Adorno, [1933] 1989; Baudrillard, 1996) Notably, feminist critiques have emphasized the home as a site of struggle, and how women subjected to gender-based domestic abuse need shelter from the home (Dobash and Dobash, 1979; Martin 1981). The home is not only a sanctuary but also a site of care duties and labour, as well as abuse and violence. As French film-maker and writer Marguerite Duras put it:

Other things happen there than the ordinary, safety, tranquillity, the family, the sheltered nest of the home etcetera; the cruelty of the family is also inscribed in the home, the need for escape, that which causes one to commit suicide. It is all one whole. (Duras and Porte, 2016: 22, our translation)

The notion of the home as a place of coherence and safety is thus both illusory and exclusionary (Pratt, 1984; Steiner and Veel, 2021). As a site of contestation, the house is a paradoxical symbol of safety and threat. The spectrum from care to control, which is prevalent in academic discussions about the integration of technologies into everyday life, was already a key component of the home as a site long before the introduction of digital technologies.

What interests us is how we can understand what happens to the coupling of care and control when digital technologies are ingrained in the most intimate relationships: between people and their homes, between people and technologies, and between people. In the field of surveillance studies, the ambiguity between care and control as motivations for surveillance practices has long been a prevalent theme. Emphasis has been placed on the caring aspect of surveillance – the incentive to ‘look after’ someone (Lyon, 2001) – and on how the very technologies that can be used to track and control are also technologies of care and offer affordances of fun, entertainment and gamification (Albrechtslund and Dubbeld, 2005). Shifts in surveillance culture have been central to these developments throughout the 21st century. Weibel (2002) noted that the panoptic principle had turned into a pleasure principle. This has created new forms of control that are intimately linked to the consumer realm (Bauman and Lyon, 2013). When this blurring of boundaries between care and control within the technologies themselves coalesces with the ambivalence of the home, new constellations of care and control emerge that can be described as ‘ambiguous and enmeshed domains, not so easy to disentangle’ (Widmer and Albrechtslund, 2021: 80).

Moreover, current security narratives around smart home technologies that stress policing the threshold of the home are underpinned by assumptions that compound the risks to domestic abuse victims. Such narratives assume that users are the same as account owners, that end-users do not intend to use technologies harmfully, that there is trust between co-residents, and that privacy issues concern ‘stranger danger’ from outside (Freed et al., 2018). Studies have shown that the work of setting up, programming and maintaining smart home technologies – also known as digital housekeeping – is usually performed by one person in the household, frequently one who identifies as male (Aagaard, 2023; Kennedy et al., 2015). Residents often report ‘peace of mind’ as an incentive to integrate IoT technologies; this taps into surveillance studies research, which points to how such technologies invoke ‘disembodied control from a distance’ (Monahan, 2010: 113). Recent scholarship in criminology identifies ‘omnipresence’ as key to technology-facilitated abuse (Yardley, 2021). While advertisers propound the smart home’s convenience, efficiency and safety (Chambers, 2020), abuse studies reveal how those same properties are weaponized in cases of domestic violence (Lopez-Neira et al., 2019). Perpetrators of abuse often present controlling behaviours as ‘caring’ (Lopez-Neira et al., 2019), in this way foregrounding the home’s ambivalence in new digitized ways.

Another key property of the digitized home is the increased blurring of its boundaries, which in the same manner as the care-control complex extrapolated above should be seen in a longer cultural historical trajectory that deals with the home versus its other (Steiner, 2010) and can be found in conceptualizations of glass as a building material (Steiner and Veel, 2016) as well as the early history of the landline phone as a household technology that breaches the threshold and privacy of the home (Marvin, 1988). The integration of digital technologies throughout our everyday lives means that it is increasingly difficult to pinpoint where the home is located. In many instances, the mobile phone takes on the form and function of a mobile home. Our phone is where we store the things we would once have kept in a drawer at home: our family photos, our correspondence (now in the form of text messages, chats and emails). The home thus becomes a distributed entity, dispersed over different physical and digital devices, displaying a porosity that diverges from that of the glass wall or the insertion of the landline in so far as they offer the possibility of controlling devices within the home while located outside. In complex ways the digital home thus reinforces and resists the notion of the home as a closed container (Steiner and Veel, 2011, 2017). Scholarship in digital media and cultural studies addresses how fibre-optic networks open up the home (Chun, 2006), and how the home’s smart sensors, interactive assistants and networked machines are sources of extractable information and data (Bauman and Lyon, 2013). These different but coalescing tendencies all help to change the ontological status of the home as both place and time are destabilized. As surveillance studies scholar Michele Rapoport (2012: 325) notes: ‘Seen from practically anywhere (through internet access, for example) and at any time of day, the home as place becomes segmented into observable, monitored, deterritorialized spaces detached from singular, unique and unrepeatable time and from the tangibility of site’. The technology-saturated home’s segmented nature is what allows us to address it as ‘an intensity of flows, of people, things, materials and more’ (Pink, 2023: 109). It is a site that is ‘always changing in relation to the people, processes, things and experiences that constitute it’ (Pink, 2023: 109).

Nonetheless, even amid this fluid sense of the home as a site of interrelations between buildings, technologies and people, we must not lose hold of the felt, physical and visceral experience of this environment: for those who are subjected to technology-facilitated domestic abuse, the distributed home is not an abstract entity but something sensed by the individual body in a particular space. Conceiving of these properties as ‘leaky’ provides a fruitful way for us to hold on to that experience: the leaky home is a distributed space that engages in a constant negotiation between care and control and in which bodies interact with each other.

Bleeding, Seeping, Dripping, Leaking

The noun ‘leak’ means ‘a hole or fissure in a vessel containing or immersed in a fluid, by which the latter enters or escapes from the vessel, so as to cause loss or injury’ (OED). From the late 19th century onwards, the term also refers to the gradual loss of an electric charge. However, not only containers but also bodies can be leaky. The Oxford English Dictionary mentions urine and incontinence as connotations of leakiness. In a more figurative sense, ‘leaky’ can describe a memory that is not retentive, or people who are unable to keep a secret. The latter is the sense that dominates in conceptualizations of information or intelligence leaks (Agostinho and Thylstrup, 2019). At its heart, the idea of leakiness conveys a sense of something being out of control – spilling over, seeping out, becoming uncontained. It is notable that images of leaks related to the body are prominent in feminist poststructuralist theory. In her seminal book Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism, Elisabeth Grosz (1994: 203) remarks that ‘women’s corporeality is inscribed as a mode of seepage’. In Leaky Bodies and Boundaries: Feminism, Postmodernism and (Bio)ethics, Margrit Shildrick (1997: 34) notes that ‘The very sign of fertility, the menses, has been regarded as evidence of women’s inherent lack of control of the body and, by extension, of the self.’

Leakage thus comes with connotations of the unintentional and lack of control. It blurs boundaries and overcomes compartmentalization, but it is often construed as accidental and undesirable. This links it to Kristeva’s (1982: 4) concept of abjection: ‘It is [. . .] not the lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, and order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite’. Paradoxically, the imagery of leaking also evokes its opposite: stability and containment. Indeed, Irigaray (1985) remarks that fluidity calls into question the solidity of things and can thus have subversive potential. As we shall see, this complex cluster of connotations is central to the properties of the leaky home and the relationship between smart home technologies and the bodies acting within it. On one hand, the leak is a figure for loss of control; on the other, the leak is what enables the intensification of control in the smart home. There is a key shift here: once understood as a subversive condition that upsets rules, systems and order, the leak has in recent years and in particular in connection with networked media come to be seen as a default condition brought about by today’s networked culture. As Chun and Friedland (2015: 4) contend, leaks are now systemic: ‘New media are not simply about leaks: they are leak. New media work by breaching, and thus paradoxically sustaining, the boundary between private and public.’

Crucially, Chun and Friedland emphasize that leaking is fundamental to the dissemination of networked media: a leak is not incidental, nor does it indicate a flaw. A network – whether comprising individuals, organizations, or devices – must exchange information among its constituents, ideally rapidly, to maintain its functionality. This fundamentally shifts the connotations of the leak from signifying a loss of control that subverts a system to becoming the system itself. As an affordance of networked culture, the leak is not a condition that one must rectify by finding and patching the hole; rather, leaking is intrinsic to living in a networked culture. Feminist critiques and conceptualizations of the leak are an important step on this conceptual trajectory, firstly because the notion of the body as leaking recognizes the leak not as fault (a hole in a pipe) but default (a part of how a body functions). But secondly also because notions of a leaky body foreground the leak as a physical experience, which prompts us to pay attention to the material effects of the smart home, for instance how the body within the smart home experiences the condition of being entangled and part of an environment where information is continuously leaking from and coagulating in new patterns that open up for new avenues of care or control. By tracing the shift in the conceptualization of the leak – from something that upsets or upends a system to being the system itself – we can begin to think about how that system’s spatial and temporal aspects create affordances for the complex intermingling of care and control as acted out and experienced by the bodies within that space.

Thinking about the temporal aspects of the leak, we are inspired by science and technology scholar Zoë Sofoulis’s (2000: 192) notion of ‘container technologies’. She argues that leakage happens at different intensities and speeds, emphasizing its temporality:

Not all containers are designed to be impermeable or like the jug capable of outpouring: some are for slow leakage, some for soaking up drips, others for what we hope will be permanent containing. An extended analysis of containers would therefore have to examine ‘incontinence’ – various deliberate (as in a colander or coffee filter), catastrophic (like the Titanic or Chernobyl), or merely embarrassing(!) failures of containment.

This understanding of leakage allows us to examine the porosity of the home as not only a spatial quality but also a temporal quality. A leak can happen at various intensities that determine the speed at which control bleeds, seeps or drips. The temporal aspect is also emphasized by sociologist Zygmunt Bauman (2000), whose Liquid Modernity notes the transition from a solid, hardware-focused modernity to a liquid, software-focused modernity. He suggests ‘fluidity’ as a fitting metaphor to grasp the current form of modernity:

While solids have clear spatial dimensions but neutralize the impact, and thus downgrade the significance, of time (effectively resist its flow or render it irrelevant), fluids do not keep to any shape for long and are constantly ready (and prone) to change it; and so for them it is the flow of time that counts, more than the space they happen to occupy: that space, after all, they fill but ‘for a moment’. (Bauman, 2000: 2)

As Bauman (2000: 2) notes, metaphors of fluidity bring a sense of lightness that stems from their mobility: ‘We associate “lightness” or “weightlessness” with mobility and inconstancy: we know from practice that the lighter we travel the easier and faster we move’. These connotations of lightness and mobility may make that which seeps and envelops us seem less threatening, but we might ask what happens when practices of control also become fluid. What happens if the material properties of that which leaks weigh down on particular people, making them vulnerable in new ways?

Over the past couple of decades, surveillance too has become fluid, driven in no small part by consumer demand and the integration of connected technologies throughout public and private spaces. In their 2013 book Liquid Surveillance, Bauman and surveillance scholar David Lyon extend the theoretical framework of liquidity to describe surveillance in its late modern forms. They note that surveillance has slipped into a liquid state, increasingly seeping into new areas of life: ‘Surveillance spreads in hitherto unimaginable ways, responding to and reproducing liquidity. Without a fixed container, but jolted by “security” demands and tipped by technology companies’ insistent marketing, surveillance spills out all over’ (Bauman and Lyon, 2013: 2–3). This imagery echoes Deleuze (1992: 3–4), who builds on Foucault to describe the transition from disciplinary societies to societies of control: ‘We are in a generalized crisis in relation to all the environments of enclosure – prison, hospital, factory, school, family. The family is an “interior,” in crisis like all other interiors’. The opening up of containers does not mean that we are entering an outside that is beyond the reach of power, only that power is taking on a different form: ‘Enclosures are molds, distinct castings, but controls are a modulation, like a self-deforming cast that will continuously change from one moment to the other, or like a sieve whose mesh will transmute from point to point’ (Deleuze, 1992: 4). For Deleuze, societies of control occupy a state beyond the inside-outside dichotomy that is no less restrictive but where power and agency are much more difficult to locate. Deleuze’s image of the sieve (a domestic tool that offers a well-worn metaphor for a leaky, porous condition) is worth attention here. Its dynamic, transmuting qualities allow us to highlight that the notion of the leaky home is more complex than control leaking from the inside out or the outside in. Instead, it describes the fundamentally fluid nature of remote control as a condition that in and through its operations constantly dissolves and establishes that which is governed, including the interpersonal relations being played out within these spaces.

While gesturing towards the notion of liquid and modulation, we opt for the notion of the leak precisely because of its feminist connotations which grounds it in the fundamentally material, situated and sticky aspects of being bodily situated in the technologically saturated home. As our examples below will illustrate, we are not proposing to transpose the responsibility and agency of those performing digital coercive control from the individual to the wider techno-cultural assemblage of the smart home, but to acknowledge that the technological affordances and their embedding in contemporary surveillance cultures offer new and expanded possibilities for this behaviour.

Opened up for remote control, the contemporary technology-saturated home makes these theoretical reflections extremely concrete and tangible. The smart home can be accessed anywhere, at any time, available for control to operate in fluid new configurations of omnipresence (Stark, 2007). The key question is therefore: as the home becomes networked and therefore subject to these leaky qualities, what happens to the care-control spectrum? Contemporary culture has seen a general shift in attitudes towards surveillance, which is now also involving care and pleasure (Lyon, 2018) . We wonder whether and how that shift implicitly contributes to the rearticulation of the home and domestic life as a site of control. The terminology of the leak gives us a conceptual figure with which to explore the different kinds of leaks that enable the home to be remotely controlled. We embrace the paradox of talking about containers and leakage while trying to describe a distributed space with no fixed inside or outside, where the direction of the leak is never one-way. Moreover, this imagery allows us to examine the different ways in which pervasive technologies open up the home, not by mistake but by design. Inspired by Sofoulis’s notion of container technologies and Bauman’s emphasis on the temporality of fluidity, we see how various degrees of containment and leakage are built into design, and in doing so we can develop a vocabulary for the various properties of different instances of leakage. In the next section, we draw on recent examples that show how connected technologies enable new articulations of control within and beyond the home. In different ways, these examples demonstrate how our notion of the leaky home can grasp the complexities at stake in current rearticulations of the relationship between people, home, technology and control.

Leaky Homes

As noted in the introduction, at the sinister end of the spectrum between control and care, the exploitation of technologies to facilitate the harassment and control of individuals is on the rise (Tanczer et al., 2018, 2021; Woodlock, 2017). The UK’s largest domestic violence charity, Refuge, reported that 72 per cent of the women who accessed its services in 2019 had experienced technology-facilitated abuse, including online harassment, location-tracking via GPS devices attached to their cars or hidden in children’s toys, and surveillance via spyware installed in their homes (Refuge, 2020). Similar tendencies have been identified in other countries in the Global North. In a pioneering Australian survey of support practitioners conducted in 2013, 98 per cent of participants who worked with victims of domestic violence had clients who had experienced technology-facilitated abuse (Woodlock, 2013).

It is currently hard to pinpoint the extent to which smart home technologies extend and/or reconfigure the tactics of coercive control, and more thorough mappings are needed. The volatile intermingling of care and control that lies at the heart of the leaky home is part of what makes it so difficult to create such mappings. Available research and media reports give a clear sense of the current rise in such cases and indicate the various ways technologies designed for safety, convenience, and care, including baby monitors, smart speakers, smart watches, and video doorbells, are being misused to control and harass (Rogers, 2023). Tanczer et al.’s (2021: 437) report on interviews (conducted between 2018 and 2020) with representatives of the UK’s voluntary and statutory support sector notes: ‘Interviewees perceive that the deployment of IoT is yet to reach its full scale, showcased by statements such as: “I think we’re at a stage with this IoT stuff that we were a few years ago with the social media stuff”.’ The same report also notes that such cases are often connected to gaslighting, where victims start doubting their own experience:

Abuse itself is not about just a physical presence of the perpetrator, it’s the emotional, mental, manipulating, coercive, control, and this is what these devices, although we all love them when they’re used in a positive manner, but it really can be used in such a negative connotation, which we have seen. (Tanczer et al., 2021: 438)

The liquid qualities of the technologies are thus echoed in the forms of abuse they facilitate. Harris and Woodlock (2019) contend that spacelessness is a defining feature of technology-facilitated intimate partner violence, or ‘digital coercive control’. In other words, digital devices and technologies afford new configurations of control that transcend the home’s spatial boundaries and move into new territories. Crucially, control from a distance becomes a defining characteristic, and new possibilities of control, entrapment and the micro-regulation of everyday behaviour emerge (Stark, 2007). But while spacelessness, omnipresence and remote control are key features of technology-facilitated abuse, the materiality of these new configurations of control is felt by spatially situated bodies. Drawing on the surveillance insight of Foucault (1991) that the feeling of being watched and its disciplinary effects are activated by the very possibility of being seen, we argue that the remote access afforded by connected technologies deeply affects the embodied and affective experience of the home. Sensors and connected devices can contribute to a perceived atmosphere of control and surveillance, which may also be the intended effect sought by the perpetrator (Søilen, 2021). The embodied and multisensory experience of the connected home, where you can be monitored and harassed from afar, creates new anxieties and a heightened sense of alarm and vulnerability. A recent study based on qualitative interviews found that survivors of technology-facilitated abuse felt it ‘magniﬁed and expanded the negative outcomes and trauma of domestic violence by rendering it ubiquitous and inescapable’ (Dragiewicz et al., 2019: 39). Understanding the home as leaky by design allows us to probe and challenge this spacelessness, and to tease out the sites where it manifests itself, while acknowledging the role of material devices such as interactive assistants, sensors, and smartphones, and their material effects on the human body (Lupton, 2020).

While the forms of technology-facilitated abuse referred to above are deeply concerning, we argue that they need to be seen in the context of a more general normalization throughout domestic life of control and surveillance practices that can be placed at the ‘light’ or ‘mundane’ end of the spectrum, and which are more closely integrated with practices of care (Steeves and Jones, 2010; Taylor and Rooney, 2017). Indeed, one of the core strengths of our notion of the leaky home is precisely its attunement to these intricacies of the care-control complex. The figure of the leaky home highlights that the technologies’ problematic qualities are not holes that need patching or bugs that need fixing, but rather are inherent to the technologies’ design. When practices of tracking and controlling are increasingly perceived as mundane features of everyday family and domestic life, and are even incorporated into caring behaviours and relationships, the boundaries between care and control become slippery and unstable.

Affordances of remote access enable new forms of omnipresence in the home, with multiple streams of information that are accessible from afar. Indeed, the dominant discourse in smart home tech companies’ marketing materials endorses the idea of the home as a site of control and promotes the imaginary of peace of mind via total overview. For example, promotional material for the Amazon Ring doorbell promises ‘complete control from the Ring app’: users are promised remote control over their home through real-time notifications on their smartphone whenever motion is detected, and live streams of the home to ‘see what’s happening as it’s happening’; they can also subscribe to a plan that stores recordings from their home so that they ‘never miss a thing’ (Ring, 2023).

It is crucial to bear in mind that the design of smart technologies neither emerges from nor operates in a gender-neutral space (Sovacool et al., 2021). The use and control of smart home technologies – and hence the control those technologies afford – is often unevenly distributed within the household (Strengers et al., 2019). In a recent study of opposite-sex couples living in smart homes in Denmark, the gendered implications of the smart home is highlighted: it was most often the male participants who bought, installed and oversaw the user accounts for the smart technologies in the household; in some cases, they were the only household members with the access required to configure the devices (Aagaard, 2023). The same study found that when participants described their everyday practices related to smart technologies, being in charge of digital housekeeping implied a central position of control within the household (Aagaard, 2023). For example, one male respondent said: ‘Yes, one of the problems with the Google Assistant is that there is only one owner of what’s called the “home”. [. . .] I’m the owner, it’s my Google account, I own it’ (Aagaard, 2023: 69). The notion of the leaky home, understood as a way of describing the relationship between home technologies and the bodies that stand in a particular relationship to one another within these spaces, thus allows us to articulate not only how connected technologies afford remote access and control, but also that in some cases they subtly encourage the uneven distribution of control within the household.

Moreover, the notion of leakiness allows us to see the home as distributed not just spatially but also emotionally. One’s domestic relationships and the feelings associated with them are never left behind when one steps outside the bounded space of the home, and this is particularly true when the domestic sphere becomes extended through tethered and connective devices. Such attachments and emotions are ‘sticky’ (Ahmed, 2014), and they increasingly stick to objects such as smartphones. A pertinent illustration of this current extension of the domestic sphere and its relationships of care and control is the increasing use of tracking technologies as a parenting tool.

Tracking technologies allow parents to know the whereabouts and activities of their children and other family members in real time, both inside and outside the home. In a recent Australian study of parental attitudes towards child-tracking and geolocation technologies, a significant number of families reported using trackers such as Find, Tile, AirTag and Life360 to surveil their children’s physical location, screen time and app usage, physical activity, and sleep (Mavoa et al., 2023). Reassurance and ‘peace of mind’ were a common theme in respondents’ replies regarding the benefits of tracking technologies, but they described it as a two-way phenomenon: some parents believed that their children also felt reassured by the knowledge that their parents kept a remote digital eye on their whereabouts (Mavoa et al., 2023: 52). Thus, the use of tracking technologies no longer seems to signal distrust; instead, it is embedded in a discourse of mutual trust. Other recent studies suggest that in addition to reassurance and safety, parents employ tracking and other surveillance technologies out of a wide range of mundane motives, including convenience, coordination, curiosity and enjoyment (Widmer and Albrechtslund, 2021). For instance, the ability to check family members’ locations unobtrusively by using Find is seen as beneficial for the coordination of mundane domestic activities such as cooking dinner (Widmer and Albrechtslund, 2021). The concept of the leaky home as a notion that captures the leakiness of the care-control spectrum within the human and more-than-human relationships in a technology-saturated home allows us to recognize the different temporalities at work here: the use of tracking technologies to extend parental control evokes a sense of the home’s porous boundaries, which are sometimes wide open and sometimes bleeding, seeping, dripping.

What we see in these examples are the concretely situated experiences and sensations of different people for whom technology plays a significant role in their interpersonal relationships. Despite their differences, and without diminishing the need to conduct more thorough empirical fieldwork to take account of the particular context of each case, we contend that the conceptual figure of the leaky home captures the shared sensation of automated homes that leak through connected devices and sensors that collect, transmit, receive and share data – a sensation that runs through all the examples discussed above. The leak is a particularly apt image for the experience of this type of distributed space because it brings together postmodern metaphors of fluidity and the 21st century discourse of information leaks. The leak also has infrastructural connotations, portraying the built environment as a substance that shifts domains in very tangible ways, with consequences for the things, bodies and other environments touched by it. The figure of the leak is in this way a lens through which to read the commonalities in a growing body of empirical research that tackles the care-control complex in widely different countries and cultures. It provides a vocabulary to address the implications of those commonalities, and it calls for further empirical research to nuance and complexify how they play out in different contexts.

Conclusion: The Weight of Control

The different ways in which users understand tagging, mapping and monitoring emphasize how important it is to pay attention to the context and specificity of each bodily experience of these technologies. Surveillance and control are unevenly distributed and affect some groups more than others (Gilliom, 2001; Monahan, 2022). This means, for example, that new forms of control in the leaky home have more serious and specific consequences for vulnerable women in abusive relationships compared with parents who want peace of mind about their teenage children. As a conceptual figure, the leaky home foregrounds the bodily, visceral and sticky experience of being observed – for caring or controlling reasons – by a partner or parent, and the potential behaviour modifications that come with that experience. The notion of the leak captures the complexity of the immateriality of homes that extend beyond physical walls on one hand, and the deeply material and viscerally felt experience of living in such spaces on the other. In this article we have unfolded the theoretical implications of the concept of the leaky home, demonstrating how this concept can capture the sensations and affordances of distributed control as it impacts on individual bodies in technology-saturated homes. Although the ambivalence of the home as a site of care and control pre-existed the advent of smart technologies, those technologies and their affordances are configuring that ambivalence in new ways, and we therefore need new ways to conceptualize it. We have argued here that the notion of leakiness can reveal how the technology-saturated home is dispersed and immaterial but at the same time also profoundly material, situated and sticky. Using examples from research and media reports, we have demonstrated that the concept of the leaky home enhances our comprehension of the underlying dynamics in these scenarios, emphasizing the ways in which the smart home experience is shaped by the intensity, weight and visceral sensation of control. Empirical research on the use of smart home technologies is currently being conducted in different parts of the globe, and it is our hope that the concept of the leaky home offers a vocabulary to understand what is at work in both benign and sinister scenarios, as well as in the complex coupling of care and control that arises when technologies become part of interhuman relationships. In this way, we hope to contribute to a deeper understanding of the multifaceted nature of the contemporary digital home as a site where – to invoke Marguerite Duras – the ‘other things’ that happen are taking new forms.

Footnotes

ORCID iD

Karen Louise Grova Søilen

Notes

Karen Louise Grova Søilen’s research examines contemporary surveillance through cultural practices and imaginaries. Her research focuses on the ambivalent entanglements of everyday practices with surveillance and control and how surveillance is perceived as emotional and multisensory experiences. She received her PhD on the topic ‘Atmospheres of Surveillance’ (University of Copenhagen 2021) and is the recipient of the Surveillance Studies Network’s 2020 Early Career Researcher Award. Her work has been published in journals such as Surveillance & Society and MAST: The Journal of Media Art Study and Theory.

Kristin Veel’s research focuses on the integration of digital technologies into everyday life and its impact on the cultural imagination with particular interest in the invisibilities and uncertainties that arise from data-tracking and datafication processes. Among her publications are Tower to Tower: Gigantism in Architecture and Digital Culture (MIT Press, 2020) and Touch in the Time of Corona: Reflections on Love, Care and Vulnerability in the Pandemic (De Gruyter, 2021), both co-authored with Henriette Steiner. She is co-editor of ten collected volumes and special journal issues, including Uncertain Archives: Critical Keywords for Big Data (MIT Press, 2021).

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