The home, point by point.
Twelve tracking points inside and around a connected house: the TV, the assistant, the doorbell, the meter, the vacuum, and the rest, each with its named systems and its cut.
Home is where the sensors are. The television watches the screen and the vacuum maps the floor, while the doorbell faces the street and the meter reads the household’s pulse. This dossier walks every point on the Atlas home map in depth.
Smart tv.
TVs fingerprint whatever is on screen, from any input, then sell the viewing record. The feature ships on by default under names like content recognition. Automatic content recognition fingerprints whatever is on screen, from any input, then reports viewing to the maker and its partners. It ships enabled. Vizio paid the FTC over undisclosed Inscape tracking, and Samba TV carries the model across brands. The off switch hides under a different name in every menu.
Known systems / SAMBA TV · VIZIO INSCAPE
The television watches what you watch, and its makers sell the summary.
Thermostat.
Occupancy sensing means the thermostat knows when the house is empty and when you sleep. Usage patterns flow to the maker’s cloud. Occupancy sensing and schedules teach the device when the house is empty and who is home when. Usage flows to the vendor cloud and, in utility programs, beyond. Demand-response programs share events with utilities by design. The comfort schedule is a household diary with an API.
Known systems / NEST · ECOBEE
Comfort settings double as an occupancy log of your household.
Indoor cameras.
Home cameras upload to company clouds where staff and breaches have both reached footage, legal process too. The feed of your living room is only as private as the vendor. Feeds upload to vendor clouds where retention rules and staff access apply, legal process too. Motion events and thumbnails ride along, audio too. The FTC’s Ring settlement detailed employees and contractors viewing private feeds. Local storage and end-to-end encryption options exist for exactly this reason.
Known systems / RING · WYZE
The camera you bought for intruders records your family far more often.
The router.
Every site every device visits crosses this box, and your internet provider logs and can sell the pattern. The router is the house’s confession booth. Every device’s traffic transits one box, and the provider sees every domain by default. In the US, providers may use and share that pattern under their own policies. Broadband privacy rules were rolled back in 2017, and the FTC has documented ISP collection since. Encrypted DNS hides lookups; a trustworthy VPN moves the vantage point.
Every site your household visits crosses one box owned by a company allowed to look.
Smart meter.
Fine-grained power readings reveal when you wake, cook, shower, and leave. Utilities share usage data more widely than most customers know. Interval readings every few minutes resolve appliances and routines: wake time, cooking, laundry, vacancy. Utilities retain and share under state rules. Researchers have recovered surprisingly fine detail from power traces in lab settings. Granularity is the product, and it cuts both ways.
Your utility bill knows your schedule better than your calendar does.
Your mail.
The postal service photographs the outside of every letter, and those images are available to you and, by request, to law enforcement. The envelope is public. The postal service photographs every mailpiece exterior, and Informed Delivery emails you the images. Law enforcement obtains exterior data through the mail covers program. The paper audit trail is decades old; the digital version made it convenient. Sensitive correspondence deserves an envelope strategy: a PO box or CMRA in another name.
Known systems / USPS INFORMED DELIVERY
Even sealed mail has a public exterior, and it is photographed.
Video doorbell.
Doorbell networks record the street and neighbors, and makers have run portals giving police easy access to footage requests. Your porch watches the block. The camera records the porch and the street beyond it, neighbors included, with clips in the vendor cloud. Ring operated a police request portal for years and retired it in 2024. Axon’s Fusus platform now stitches volunteered private cameras into police real-time centers. Your porch can be a node in a network you never see.
Known systems / RING · AXON FUSUS
A neighborhood of doorbells is a surveillance network nobody voted on.
Smart lock.
Lock logs record every entry and exit by user and time. Convenient for you, and a complete household schedule for whoever holds the account. The lock logs every lock and unlock by user and code, timestamped, syncing to the vendor. Guest codes create named entries. Access logs have appeared in disputes and investigations. Convenient for you, and a complete household timetable for whoever holds the account or the subpoena.
Known systems / AUGUST · SCHLAGE
A lock that keeps records protects the house and testifies about it.
The printer.
Many color laser printers hide near-invisible dot patterns on every page encoding the device and time. Documents carry a serial number you cannot see. Many color lasers print near-invisible yellow dot grids encoding serial number and timestamp on every page. EFF research made the scheme public. Document forensics in leak cases has drawn on exactly such artifacts. Assume paper you print is signed by the machine that printed it.
Paper you print can be traced back to the machine in your home.
Robot vacuum.
The vacuum maps your floor plan with lasers and cameras, and those maps and images live in the vendor cloud. Test images have leaked before. Lidar and cameras build a floor plan, and maps, images, and cleaning logs sync to the vendor. Development images have leaked from annotation contractors. MIT Technology Review traced Roomba test images to social media through gig workers. The map of your home is worth money, which is why companies fought over the category.
Known systems / IROBOT
The robot cleaning your floor is also drafting a map of your house for a server you will never see.
Voice assistant.
The speaker listens for its wake word and ships what follows to the cloud, where recordings have been reviewed by humans and sought in court. The device buffers audio awaiting its wake word and streams what follows to the cloud. False wakes capture fragments of ordinary life. All three major vendors ran human review of recordings until 2019 reporting forced changes. Recordings persist under your account settings, and courts have sought them.
Known systems / ALEXA · GOOGLE ASSISTANT
A microphone that waits for its name is still a microphone.
Smart device hub.
Bulbs, plugs, and sensors report state changes constantly. The pattern of switches flipping is a diary of movement through the house. Bulbs, plugs, and sensors report every state change through the hub to vendor clouds. The switch log is a movement diary. Smart home telemetry has helped reconstruct timelines in investigations. Local-first platforms offer the convenience without the export.
Known systems / SMARTTHINGS
A smart home converts daily life into a machine-readable diary.
The dossier covers what these systems do. When the person on the other end of one of them is a stalker or a stranger with intent, a threat that persists, that is Darkveil’s work.
Talk to Darkveil