Beyond the Account Holder: Smart Home Bystanders and the Public Governance of Household Data Value
Year: 2026
Type: dissertation
Abstract: This thesis investigates the governance and privacy vulnerabilities created by the smart home ecosystem, focusing on non-consenting users ("bystanders") and the extraction of household data as an economic resource. By integrating legal, economic, and architectural analyses, the work exposes how current European frameworks struggle to protect bystanders within automated domestic spaces. The research evaluates legal protection under the GDPR and ePrivacy Directive alongside 15 corporate terms of service, highlighting systemic gaps in liability allocation. It further examines the EU Data Act and the economic valuation of IoT telemetry, revealing fundamental limits in traditional, individualistic "user models" and identifying regulatory friction between data exploitation rights and fundamental privacy protections. To bridge these gaps, the study scales Benjamin H. Bratton’s The Stack model into a multi-layered governance framework. This integrated model combines legal reforms (recalibrating legitimate interests, joint controllerships, and interpersonal privacy), principles for technical mandates, and structural mechanisms such as state-certified data intermediaries and standardized household sharing protocols to establish a balanced data regime for smart homes.
Author: HOANG, THAO
Language: Italian
Subfield: Law
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7220017227