Our homes are filling up with technology that can connect the internet. Smartphones are just the beginning: you can now buy connected versions of everything from light switches to coffee machines. Together, these have turned into a vision of “smart homes” where all sorts of tasks are automated and you can check in on your house from your smartphone while you’re away. Thanks to sensors in the house connected to the internet, you could keep your house at the right temperature, look at a home video feed when you’re on vacation, or check your bank balance simply by talking to a voice-activated “assistant”. 

The idea of keeping track of your home using sensors isn’t new—home devices like security cameras and thermostats have been doing it for years—but having them send data about your house over the internet is. So before boosting your house’s IQ, it might be worth asking a few questions. Like, what risks do you expose yourself to when your security camera streams footage to your phone? And do you need to be concerned about your privacy when you have a microphone in your house, always listening and connected? 

In late 2016, as many as a million hacked smart-home devices, including simple web cameras, were conscripted into a digital war to temporarily take down significant chunks of the internet. When homeowners fail to change the default password on their smart-home devices, it’s even possible for hackers to access information about your home directly. Thanks to exploits like these, some unsavory sites are able to pull together vast collections of unsecured camera steams from peoples’ homes, which anyone on the internet can view. 

And the fact that these sensors send data over the internet introduces some privacy risks even when there’s no malicious intent: earlier this year, Amazon was ordered to turn over user data as evidence in a murder case where an Amazon voice assistant device was used to play music on the night of the crime. Some products—from thermostats to speakers—may also collect data on you by default in order to sell it to advertisers. 

Thankfully, if linking up your home is important to you, there are some ways you can make it less risky. The first step is to do your homework before you buy one of these devices. You can look connected home devices up to look for known security issues, and check whether they release software updates to keep their devices safe. You can also look up how companies use the data collected by their devices. Depending on the product, it may be possible to switch off the option to have your data collected and sold to third parties. 

And if you do buy a smart-home device, the FTC recommends that you change the default password on any connected devices you buy, and check the manufacturer’s website from time to time to check for any new software updates. These two steps alone will go a long way towards making your connected devices more secure. They also recommend making sure that connected devices you buy, like cameras that send video feeds to apps on your phone, use encryption to make sure that no one can tap into the feed. 

If being able to check in on your home from afar and order a pizza by talking to a speaker sounds exciting to you, then it may be worth it to have sensors in your home linked up to the internet. After all, smart homes are a new frontier, and hopefully as the technology in these devices matures, their security likely will, too. But if all of these considerations sound like too much of a hassle, then a lower-tech solution may be a better fit.