The Label "Smart" Device Might Not Be a Good Thing: Read Jathan Sadowski's "Too Smart"

 Here is a book to add to your critical Edtech and critical thinking about technology list, even though it goes back a bit to 2020.

"Too Smart: How Digital Capitalism Is Extracting Data, Controlling Our Lives, and Taking Over the World" By Jathan Sadowski

Sadowski takes you through a critical overview of how companies are purposefully making their products "smart" products in order to facilitate data extraction for exploitation purposes. 

When a device is labeled "smart" you can bet it is gathering data about you and not always for your benefit. 

• Free consumer apps companies use this data to sell. 
• Insurance companies use this data against you in their pricing schemes and to manipulate you in your driving habits.
• Government entities use it in their surveillance activities.

After reading this book, when a salesperson touts that a TV or a dryer is a "smart" device, you will not automatically see that as a plus. You will know that it is more of a tactic of exploitation at best and manipulation at the worst.

A lot of money has been spent on convincing us as consumers that the quality of being "smart" is a good thing for our devices. It is not.

Sadowski even suggests ideas of how to disrupt and avoid all this, from turning off these features or anything related to them to the idea of purposefully sabotaging the whole smart enterprise.

There is a lot to be said about shading parts of your life out of reach of Big Tech.