Make a smart home 29th Jun 2026 Lucy Hattersley 4 comments The dream of a smart home has been with humanity ever since The Jetsons aired in 1962. Lights that know when you walk in, thermostats that learn your schedule, speakers that answer to your every word… And for a while it seemed that we were living in that future. Apart from the flying cars, we had smart speakers, voice assistants, clever lights, and homes warmed to Goldilocks levels of perfection. Read the latest issue of Raspberry Pi Official Magazine What we increasingly had to think about was that every light bulb, smart plug, connected switch, and speaker is talking to the internet. They chat away to a range of companies, from small operations in China to massive US tech behemoths and everywhere in between. In 2023, a House of Commons Committee report stated that 77% of UK adults own at least one smart home device, and that, on average, there are nine such devices in every UK home.
That’s a lot of chatter going to data centres. All of these devices phone home to analytics servers, send telemetry to manufacturers, and pass DNS queries through a variety of third-party infrastructure. Folks agree to all of this through T&Cs that they never read. Privacy first Running a Raspberry Pi is a great way to fix all of this mess; with Home Assistant, you can build a privacy-first smart home hub.
Source: https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/make-a-smart-home/
That’s a lot of chatter going to data centres. All of these devices phone home to analytics servers, send telemetry to manufacturers, and pass DNS queries through a variety of third-party infrastructure. Folks agree to all of this through T&Cs that they never read. Privacy first Running a Raspberry Pi is a great way to fix all of this mess; with Home Assistant, you can build a privacy-first smart home hub.
Source: https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/make-a-smart-home/