Chapter 7 returns to the smart home as a way of examining the collected world challenges that will arise for information privacy law. It reviews the multidisciplinary literature on privacy risks in the smart home. It then highlights that sensor data collections are different in nature to the type of data collections envisaged by the control model of information privacy. Smart home sensor data collections are circular and continuous, which challenges the basis of rationality modes of consent provision, through privacy policies. Moreover, the very notion of control is challenged in boundary dispersed environments, such as the smart home, which are essentially fragmented and contested. These factors give rise to significant challenges for the control model of information privacy law and its focus on the process of personal information exchange.

Chapter 8 investigates the protection of information privacy in a collected world. A critique of the control model is undertaken in relation to five intended outcomes of information privacy law: enhancement of individual autonomy through non-interference protections at the point of data collection; power vacuums that preserve spaces for autonomous decision-making; information privacy law’s mode of transactional operation; the use of privacy policies, as information disclosure mechanisms; and in-built balancing mechanisms, which seeks to ensure fair outcomes for individuals and data collectors. Julie Cohen’s work is then examined as a means of further critiquing the control model and reshaping a conceptual focus of information privacy based on a more explicit power-related role. The new focus shifts what information privacy seeks to do, and challenges the fundamental precepts of the control model and what information privacy currently seeks to protect. The five intended outcomes thus change markedly. At the heart of this reformulated movement is Cohen’s work on modulation, which better describes the consequences and challenges that arise from the collected world.

Chapter 10 concludes the book by asking the question of whether we are heading for a smart, collected or modulated world. The smart world is an uncritical one where the technological wonderment of sensorised devices and seamless service provision is accepted without question. The collected world provides a different view of the smart world, albeit largely descriptive, which highlights the underlying logics at play in relation to ubiquitous collections of sensor data. The modulated world is defiantly critical and is intended to surface the normative basis of embedded power that flows in modulated forms of knowledge production and prescriptive governance. One of the simple ways we can create a world that ensures greater benefits from technological integration, including sensorised data collections, involves our unceasing ability to tinker and play, especially in data collecting institutions.