The house meeting¶
Research brief, The Morporkian Civil Liberties Union (MCLU). Open file.
A house has people in it. Some own it, some rent a room, some are children, some are carers who come on Tuesdays, and one is an ex-partner who has not moved out yet because there is nowhere to move to.
The software that runs the place knows about one household. One account, one hierarchy, one set of permissions, one person at the top of it. The thermostat records who is home. The speaker holds several voices. The lock is a record of comings and goings that nobody agreed to keep.
Every person in that house has a privacy interest and the house has a single administrative account. There is no configuration in which all of them are correct at once.
When a household is not one person, whose preferences does a household account express?
Who is entitled to the data a house generates, and what happens to it when the household changes shape?
Who counts as the user of a home¶
The data-driven home, Savin and Nielsen, in full text and not the abstract, for what EU law says about multi-user domestic data.
The Data Act on access and portability for data from connected products: who counts as the user, and what happens when there is more than one.
Whether any smart-home service offers per-person rather than per-household accounts, and what it costs.
Tenancy and lodger law on who controls fixtures in a shared home, because the lock is also a legal object.
Refuge or similar on what happens to shared home systems when a relationship ends and nobody leaves.
Last updated: 17 September 2026