  The home is often the most private space in people's lives, and not one in
which they expect to be surveilled. However, today's market for smart home
devices has quickly evolved to include products that monitor, automate, and
present themselves as human. After documenting some of the more unusual
emergent problems with contemporary devices, this body of work seeks to develop
a design philosophy for intelligent agents in the smart home that can act as an
alternative to the ways that these devices are currently built. This is then
applied to the design of privacy empowering technologies, representing the
first steps from the devices of the present towards a more respectful future.
