Mr. Robot and the Smart Home of Today

Updated: Jul 26, 2023

Author: Marco Voltolina

Reflection on Mr. Robot episode 2x01, smart homes and the risks of technology

Note: this article contains spoilers for the second season of Mr. Robot.

In the previous article, that focused on Westworld, we have introduced the main questions that arise when digital technology and architecture meet in a smart home. We have described the risk of a detachment between the house and its inhabitant, the quasi-religious role of technology and the push towards a minimalist, impersonal aesthetic. These are deep and complex issues that involve not only architecture, but our whole systems of thought.

In this article, we will put aside such reflections for a moment and we will focus on today's state of the art in the field of smart homes. What technologies are available right now? What can they do? What concrete problems and risks do they present?

We will answer these questions through the analysis of a scene from Mr. Robot (2015-2019), a show released by USA Network and known for the great realism and accuracy with which technology is portrayed – the producers have a whole team of experienced hackers, including two ex-FBI cyber consultants (Lim, 2016).

The scene in question is from the first episode of the second season of the series. It is set in the house of Susan Jacobs, General Counsel of E Corp, a giant multi-national conglomerate that is being targeted by fsociety, a group of hackers led by the protagonist Elliot Alderson. As fsociety needs new headquarters, its members decide to hack Susan's smart home, in order to force her to leave and occupy her dwelling. When the woman returns home after jogging through Manhattan's Greenwich Village, her smart home devices start to malfunction. First, the alarm goes off, a screen comes down from the ceiling and the projector turns on, broadcasting an anti-capitalist news show.

Figure 1. The alarm of Susan's house goes off. Source: "eps2.0_unm4sk-pt1.tc", 18:00.

Figure 2. A screen comes down from the ceiling and the projector turns on. Source: "eps2.0_unm4sk-pt1.tc", 18:50.

Susan deactivates it with her tablet and goes for a swim in her indoor pool. Then the lights flicker and classical music starts to play at full volume. Susan looks confused, but proceeds to take a shower. As the water becomes exceedingly hot, she leaps out, only to find out that the thermostat has been turned to 53 degrees Fahrenheit (about 12 degrees Celsius). Susan tries to increase the temperature, but the system does not allow her to do it.

Figure 3. Susan deactivates the projector with her tablet. Source: "eps2.0_unm4sk-pt1.tc", 18:47.

Figure 4. Susan is confused as lights flicker and classical music starts to play at full volume. Source: "eps2.0_unm4sk-pt1.tc", 19:23.

Figure 5. While Susan is taking a shower, water becomes exceedingly hot. Source: "eps2.0_unm4sk-pt1.tc", 19:46.

Figure 6. Susan tries to increase the temperature of her house's thermostat. Source: "eps2.0_unm4sk-pt1.tc", 20:14.

Desperate, she goes back to the living room, with classical music playing again out loud, lights turning on and off, the alarm shrieking, the screen coming down and the phone ringing. She calls for help, but the company that installed her smart home (or, more probably, some members of fsociety) tell her that they need a few days to fix everything and suggest her to stay somewhere else in the meantime. As soon as she leaves on a limosine, the hackers – now led by Darlene, the protagonist's sister – take possession of the house.

Figure 7. Susan is desperate, with classical music playing at full volume, lights turning on and off, the alarm shrieking, the screen coming down and the phone ringing. Source: "eps2.0_unm4sk-pt1.tc", 21:07.

Figure 8. Darlene takes possession of Susan's house. Source: "eps2.0_unm4sk-pt1.tc", 23:02.

Everything that has been shown in this scene is actually plausible: all the technologies and devices exist and can be effectively installed in a house; on the other hand, also hacks of this kind can actually happen in real life.

Firstly, the alarm was probably connected with presence sensors, but also with the geo-fence in Susan's phone or watch, so that it would only go off if a stranger broke into the apartment. The hackers, therefore, just had to disable Susan's smart watch – as we can see right before she enters the house.

Figure 9. Susan's smart watch stops working. Source: "eps2.0_unm4sk-pt1.tc", 17:56.

Inside the house, all the appliances, including the alarm, are not controlled by several different apps, but by a single hub with a clear interface, that can be accessed both by dashboard mounted on the walls and by Susan's tablet. This hub allows to control the projector, the screen, the audio system (which apparently is connected to speakers placed in every room), the temperature of the shower's water, the thermostat and the light bulbs. This can all be achieved with home automation systems such as Samsung's SmartThings, with the only possible exception of the shower's temperature (Bruce, 2016).

Figure 10. A dashboard mounted on a wall in Susan's house. Source: "eps2.0_unm4sk-pt1.tc", 20:15.

Figure 11. Diagram showing a hypothesis of the functioning of Susan's smart home – CC BY-NC 2.5

Besides, it is worth noting that smart homes can be implemented with minimal interventions also in existing buildings: one can modify and integrate the house's systems without the need for massive restorations. Susan's home clearly demonstrates this, as the scene was shot in the World of McIntosh Townhouse, which was originally built as an electrical substation in 1926 by the energy company Consolidated Edison. Located in SoHo, Manhattan, during the '80s and '90s the building became a warehouse used as art gallery. Then, in 1996, a film director transformed it into a residential property and finally, in 2008, after a series of renovations, it became the showroom of audio-equipment manufacturer McIntosh. Home automation technologies are thus able also to interact with historical buildings: they do not modify the physical layout of the space, but they can radically change the way in which that same space is perceived. On one hand, they give us a great control over our homes: with simple gestures and with the help of a small device that fits in our pockets, we can play with light, temperature, sounds and so forth. On the other hand, however, the risk of loosing such control is great. As discussed in the previous article, the inhabitant no longer understands how his own house works. The words that Susan says while on the phone are yet another example of this: "Well, what am I supposed to do? . . . Unplug what? Everything is inside the walls. That's how it was installed when I ordered the smart house package". If systems are not assembled in a reversible way, that can be easily disassembled, and if there are no analog ways to switch off the devices, inhabitants will not be able to have real control over their house.

Architectural section of the World of McIntosh Townhouse, Manhattan, New York City

Figure 12. Cross-section of Susan's smart home and its smart devices – Author: Francesco Grugni – CC BY-NC 2.5

As we have said, in fact, not only the technologies shown in this scene are realistic, but also the hacks are. In fact, this problem is much more relevant than one would expect. In the last years, researchers have made several studies that espose the great weaknesses of home automation systems. For example, a 2015 report of Synack, a cyber security company, detected some serious problems in cameras, smoke detectors, thermostats and other home automation devices (Synack, 2015). Moreover, in 2016, researchers from the University of Michigan managed to hack a Samsung home automation system and get the PIN to open the house's front door (Fernandes et al., 2016).

Practically everything can be hacked: Samsung smart fridges can allow criminals to steal the users' Gmail credentials (Leyden, 2015), and even Barbie dolls can be turned into surveillance devices for spying on children and listening to their conversations (Gibbs, 2015).

And this is true not only for homes, but also for smart cities: in 2017, for example, the emergency alarm of the city of Dallas, in Texas, was hacked, causing 156 sirens across the city to sound off in the middle of the night (Holter, 2017).

The benefits of a smart home should be three: it should be safer, it should make life easier and it should be more efficient. While the last one is effectively true – smart devices can reduce the waste of electricity, heating and water, improving economic and environmental sustainability – we can argue that, as of today, smart home technologies have not yet reached a level such as to grant safety and convenience. We have seen how easy it is to hack this kind of devices, but if a company tries to improve their security, it ends up making life difficult for the users. For example, when Nest tried to solve the security issues of its thermostat, it created a system in which, just to set the home's temperature, a two-factor authentication process was required: that is, one had to open the app on his phone, enter a password, receive an sms with a verification code and enter the code (Teschler, 2017). A better alternative would be to use voice control, as in the case of Amazon Echo. However, while this is convenient and grants safety from hackers, it still presents huge problems of privacy (Garfield, 2020).

Because of these unresolved issues, market projections suggest that the use of smart home devices will not grow exponentially, but spread slowly (Teschler, 2017). So what about the alarming issues presented in the previous article? What about the risk of a detachment between the house and its inhabitant, the quasi-religious role of technology and the push towards a minimalist, impersonal aesthetic? Are those problems no longer relevant once that we have demonstrated that smart home will not invade the world in the next five years?

Of course they are relevant. It is essential to move as soon as possible towards a paradigm in which technology works at the service of human beings – and of Nature in general – instead of the opposite. In the next – and final – article of this series, we will talk about Black Mirror and lay out some future scenarios of integration between humans, architecture and technology.

Sources:

"About the Townhouse". World of McIntosh.

Baldoni, Roberto, et al. "Designing Highly Available Repositories for Heterogeneous Sensor Data in Open Home Automation Systems". Software Technologies for Embedded and Ubiquitous Systems, 7th IFIP WG 10.2 International Workshop, November 2009, Newport Beach, California, USA. ResearchGate.