DO listen to these words of wisdom:

“In the last month, Alexa has become so chatty - offering a stream of recommendations, notifications, and discovery tips - that I finally put my Echo in the storage room”.

What is currently called “smart” home actually has “a mind of its own that can lead to frustration and confusion for its owner. Indeed, when you gift or get a connected device, ownership turns into active participation with the device and various other ecosystems." Ecosystems that are, usually, needlessly, but deliberately incompatible with each other, that is a really unnecessary way to waste money on non-recyclable gadgets.

The rest of this frustrating story is here, and its meaning is clear to me:

This Christmas, give “smart home” gadgets as gift only to people you do NOT care about, and only if you really, really can’t find anything better (or as a way to get rid of smart gadgets that someone else dumped on you).

Because as things still stand, almost always a “smart” home is not, as the author of that post says, merely “a lot of time spent doing the equivalent of herding cats”.

It is also and above all a way, that becomes less excusable every year, to waste money on extra potential sources of identity theft and other security risks. Just like the smart cars spying on smartphones, by the way.