In what way is control of your daily activities transferred away by a smart kettle? Is it not going to boil the water when I want to boil the water? If it doesn't, I'll throw it away and get a regular kettle. That's pretty much the only daily activity my kettle is involved in and no amount of Internet connection is going to remove my control of it.
Consider that many appliances might be equipped with such data feeds. Consider that it might be time consuming or impossible to find a device without them.
If your kettle is deemed an interesting part of the national power infrastructure, it might even become legally mandated. I've read stories that suggest the UK power authorities watch carefully when... Dancing with the stars? finishes, because 15 seconds later, 20% of the nation puts the kettle on. It has already been suggested that "smart" thermostats might be a nice requirement, so the power company mothership can (Voluntarily, of course! initially...) reset your temperature to shape load.
If your kettle and your fridge and your thermostat and your toilet and your alarm clock and your television and your front door and your car and your vacuum and your..... are all chirping little pixels of your life picture to the mothership, you are surveiled to a degree beyond the erotic dreams of the Stasi.
Further: this bleak picture presumes that all of these little fomites are well implemented. In point of fact, many of them are wide open gateways to black hats.
>I've read stories that suggest the UK power authorities watch carefully when... Dancing with the stars? finishes, because 15 seconds later, 20% of the nation puts the kettle on.
The classic example is Eastenders (a soap set in London where everyone is miserable) and was more recently an issue with the Great British Bake Off, but the effect has apparently declined in recent years due to BBC iPlayer/catchup services/Netflix. [0]
Defcon has had a bunch of extremely interesting talks since IoT became a buzzphrase. Not that they were boring before, but the sheer scale of incompetence on behalf of the IoT manufacturers is astounding.
To me, it's not really the control of activities that will be transferred away, it's the information that people can glean from (for example) the usage logs which can be used to build a significant profile about your movements.
For example, the kettle boiled this amount of water this many times a day. The kettle isn't boiled between 6am and 6pm so we can deduce that nobody is home during those hours, but the autoboil function initiates at 5.30am on weekdays so we know the owner gets up early. On some Fridays it's later, so they either work more hours or they're off socializing. The quantities boiled suggest that only one person is drinking a hot drink most days. More water is boiled on Saturday mornings, suggesting that someone else spends the night on Friday. External access from the smartphone app comes from $provider but two different phones, suggesting that the drinker has access to two phones.
Now add in a name, phone number, and credit card usage data obtained from a third party, and suddenly you have something that someone will want. If it proves valuable enough, other manufacturers make a similar product, and suddenly a "dumb" kettle becomes much harder to get.
Boiling regularly on weekday mornings and late on weekends? Likely someone with regular employment and able to pay bills. Boiling times consistent with working shifts? Hm, likely working class.. Boiling times irregular and most of the time late in the morning? Looks unemployed, don't sell anything on credit..
But what if smart kettles would became so popular that regular kettles would not be produced anymore? How would you replace it then? Or, more importantly: how about "smart" lightbulbs, door locks, refridgerators? Those are much harder to replace.
Thrift stores. A metal pot. A tin can. Literally any heat-conducting container placed on a stove can be a kettle. This is a technology that likely predates the written word. I don't see it going away anytime soon. We have never needed the Internet to boil water. That isn't going to change.
Imagine this: you're on your way home, it's a cold and wet winter night, you're dashing from the bus stop to your home and you want a hot cup when you get home. Just trigger the kettle to fill and boil enough for you with the app on your phone, and you'll be warm that much faster when you get in the door.
Maybe there's an autocoffee model, which makes your coffee to your preferences, and you get it to pre-boil while you're heading for home. Using the GPS on your phone with your average walking speed, it calculates when you'll be home so your coffee (or tea or hot chocolate) are just cooling to the perfect temperature when you walk in the door.
You may think it won't happen, but how many would use an autokettle? I wouldn't, as I don't often drink hot drinks, but my mother might because she won't have to hobble around. A blind person might, too, for a similar reason. People who prefer consistent drinks would - I have one particular friend who hates Starbucks but drinks there anyway, because it's always exactly the same.
