Your Smart Coffee Machine Knows What You Did Last Summer: A Legal Analysis of the Limitations of Traditional Privacy of the Home under Dutch Law in the Era of Smart Technology

Abstract

The increasing number of smart devices entering our homes have implications for privacy. Not only do we bring in more spying devices into the home, often these smart objects are linked to data streams or other devices that leave the home – thereby literally taking private matters into public space. In this paper, we take the context of the Netherlands to show that current legal definitions and protections of the home are inadequate to deal with novel privacy threats that stem from devices that interact with us beyond the screen.