If you’re looking at building or making major modifications to your home, some of the most important contemporary additions can come from cutting-edge digital tech. The right piece of equipment installed in the right place can fundamentally reshape how you spend your home life, but it’s not without complexities. As user-friendly as many home technologies have become to use, there can be hidden pitfalls that users need to take into account to minimize risk. Taking a proactive approach, however, you can mitigate risk before it even occurs.

A Right to Privacy

It’s only natural to be proud of a well-designed home, but showing it off constantly might not be a good idea, especially if the design is distinctive. In this day and age, particularly, lots of social media icons highlight the process of home renovation and take great pride in boasting about their DIY projects. There’s nothing wrong with this: in fact, you can amass a very decent following and maybe even make an additional income. However, it’s definitely worth keeping in mind the risks.

Take the lessons from this Express VPN article on how to stay safe on social media platforms, as an example. If you have a nice home and an active presence on social media, you could open yourself up to harassment or stalking. For this reason, you’ll want to avoid taking photos of the exterior that could be easily identifiable to followers online. In addition, you’ll want to avoid tagging your specific location and stick to more generic country-wide tags, so you’re less traceable. Paying attention to what’s in your photos and using multiple accounts for more personal contacts can also be helpful for privacy concerns.

Don’t Forget About Accessibility

When installing tech in your house, you need to understand that failure of components is inevitable. A common way this occurs is through a failure of the fiber optic line, which can happen through general age, environmental conditions, or manufacturing faults. Similarly, device components like projector bulbs will always burn out over time, lasting up to a maximum of 4,000 hours according to TVSPRO. For this reason, houses need to be designed with access in mind, whether in the walls or directly to awkwardly placed devices.

Avoid Subscription Services for Proprietary Smart Tech

Smart home technology has brought numerous small but important changes to the way we live. It can afford users better control, automate basic tasks, and even save energy with certain plans. Smart home systems can also come with a major caveat when they tie into online subscription services, however.

Specifically, any proprietary and closed device will need to rely on a service’s host to operate properly. If the host company shuts down, like Insteon did, as noted in this Hackaday article, smart functionality can shut down, leaving users without recourse. When this happens, what you paid for will stop working, meaning a substantial fixing task ahead. Luckily, addressing this problem can be as simple as using vendor agnostic open source automation software, which is transferrable between different systems should the worst come to term.

With these simple tips in mind, homeowners should be far better prepared for the concerns that cutting-edge technology in the home can represent. Make no mistake, if properly implemented, all of these systems can do great things, it’s just a matter of being prepared for the worst. With luck, you won’t ever have to take the more drastic actions listed above, but if the more challenging does arrive, you’ll be ready.