Chapter 7 returns to the smart home as a way of examining the collected world challenges that will arise for information privacy law. It reviews the multidisciplinary literature on privacy risks in the smart home. It then highlights that sensor data collections are different in nature to the type of data collections envisaged by the control model of information privacy. Smart home sensor data collections are circular and continuous, which challenges the basis of rationality modes of consent provision, through privacy policies. Moreover, the very notion of control is challenged in boundary dispersed environments, such as the smart home, which are essentially fragmented and contested. These factors give rise to significant challenges for the control model of information privacy law and its focus on the process of personal information exchange.

Chapter 3 examines the implications of sensorisation in the smart home. The smart home is chosen as a collected world case study for several reasons. First, it is a site of dense sensorisation and thus a good space to explore technological infrastructures that belie the smart world. Second, it is one of the prime sites of sensor data commercialisation, including the new business models that are developing. Third, the home is a legally protected idyll of the ‘private’ and it plays a cherished role as a space of autonomous individual growth in liberal societies. The chapter details the complex data generation anatomy of the smart home and examines it from its sensing, reasoning and intervening processes. Even though the smart home is framed as a space of seamless technological experience, its infrastructural anatomy is fragmented and multifarious because it includes multiple data collection devices, diverse collection pathways and involves several different infrastructures. Chapter 3 concludes by highlighting that sensor data is key to the operation of the smart home and the business models that are now starting to develop.

Chapter 4 examines commercial imperatives for collections of sensor data by exploring the rapid development of smart home insurance business models. A brief history of smart home insurance is provided to situate three conceptualised models of smart home data exchange partnership involving insurers and smart home device or system providers. The models are entitled the Partnered Data Acquisition, Partnered Intermediary and Platform Entity models. Each model involves a partnership arrangement between an established insurer and a smart home device or system provider. However, while each model seeks to capitalise value from smart home sensor data, each model does so in different ways, across three spectra, namely, collection of data, connection to mutually beneficial services and condition setting. An analysis of relevant privacy policies is undertaken to highlight each model’s operational data structure, the sensor data collected and its foundational characteristics. In turn, this analysis highlights the commercial uses of smart home sensor data involving new logics, business relationships and intended service outcomes.