Visitor Experience

The experience of a guest is pretty simple: upon approaching the threshold of the house, they see a touchscreen showing icons that represent different listening systems:

• speech transcription (Alexa, Siri, etc)
• video recording (Dropcam, IP cameras, local CCTV systems)
• "Other" (catchall for any other technology that guests can disable, like MAC-sniffing devices, other wireless monitors, etc)

Here's what the swipe looks like; apologies for the lo-fi prototyping:

Disabling camera systems

Homeowner Experience

Setting up a flexible system that can disable your home electronics is a bit daunting. Part of the reason I'm making this into an open project on Hackaday is that I imagine the audience will be more comfortable with technical setups than the average consumer (though, that being said, it raises a host of issues about the responsibility of selling complex and opaque surveillance technology to a mass consumer market who are unable to probe its complexities).

I don't have much of an interaction flow designed for the homeowner-setup process yet, but basically it will consist of these steps:

• OpenWRT router boots and realizes it is unconfigured
• Router enables a (secured) SSID whose default password is printed on the router (or otherwise supplied with the hardware), prompting the owner to log in
• Owner sees a configuration page similar to the stock OpenWRT Luci interface; from this list, the owner can identify devices that should be blockable by the Mezzo system.
• Owner may also identify slave devices on the subnet; a slave device is basically a commodity 110v outlet switch that the router can toggle. This allows any device to be turned off by guests, not just devices whose traffic can reliably be blocked.

System Design / Complexity

...the system's internal logic is significantly more nuanced. In the next few build logs I'll talk through my reasoning for several of these problems, such as:

• How to detect when a visitor has left the house? There's a lot of work to be done here, since it's not reasonable to ask departing guests to remember to re-enable all the systems. A simple timeout period, like "disable all these devices for 2 hours" might have to suffice initially.
• How to prevent non-houseguests (ie, passers-by) from interfering with the system? For example, when you go on vacation, you do not want your burglar to disable the Dropcam before robbing you...
• How to clearly signal the functionalities of this interface to first-time guests without overwhelming them?