Smart Locks May Not Be That Clever For Home Security
Would we really want an App that can open our front doors and turn off our alarms as we stroll up and bark the order?
Could we ever have confidence that it was a secure solution?
Manufacturers of smart locks clearly think so.
There are now four leading brands of lock on the market that can be controlled from a phone via Bluetooth and a Home Hub.
These are August, Kwikset, Schlage and Yale.
Some are only compatible with Amazon’s Echo and Alexa, some with Google’s Home and Assistant, some with Apple’s HomeKit and Siri.
Last week, August launched the latest version of its Smart Lock, which it claims will work with all three.
To my mind, though, it is one thing to have such an App put the central heating on, it is another to have it open up your house.
Even the old tumbler and mortice locks have needed to be upgraded over time to stay ahead of Jack the Lad and his swag bag. As a result, there are decades of tried and tested mechanical design keeping our residences secure.
Yet, in a time when we are invited to believe that keeping prying foreign powers out of our most secure computer installations is a challenge, we are expected to believe that digital technology, in the flush of its youth, will keep ne’er-do-wells out of our living rooms.
You can buy a small ‘wireless spy microphone’ for about a tenner these days.
How long, I wonder, before these are being hidden outside houses to record that ‘open sesame’ instruction that could later give a free pass inside via a hacked home hub.
