A different room to check
Your landlord's smart-home system knows when you come and go
This isn't a story about a landlord spying on you personally — most of this tech exists for maintenance and liability reasons. But it's your home for the length of a lease, and right now it's an open legal question being tested in court, not a settled one.
A National Apartment Association survey found more than 60% of newly built multifamily units now include at least one smart-home feature — a smart lock, video doorbell, or connected thermostat. A Rent.com renter survey found 57% of renters are specifically concerned landlords could use smart locks to monitor their movements.
This is being tested in court right now. In December 2025, the ACLU of Northern California sued Equity Residential and SmartRent Technologies in San Francisco Superior Court (Case No. CGC-25-631212) on behalf of the San Francisco Tenants Union — alleging mandatory smart-home systems logged residents' door-access patterns, occupancy schedules, and thermostat settings without meaningful consent. As of this writing the case is active and unresolved — an arbitration motion was continued to June 18, 2026.
What a landlord-installed system can actually log
- Smart locks — every lock/unlock event, often timestamped with which credential was used. Effectively an entry/exit log of your own home.
- Connected thermostats — temperature changes over time, which can reveal occupancy patterns (when you're home, when you're away, irregular schedules).
- Leak/water sensors — usually just a binary wet/dry signal, but often bundled into the same app and account as lock and thermostat data.
- Video doorbells the landlord owns and controls — footage of who comes to your unit, not just building common areas.
None of this is hidden — it's disclosed somewhere in your lease or a smart-home app you were asked to install. The question is whether you ever actually read it.
Where the legal line actually sits
- Physical entry notice is well-established. Most states require 24-48 hours' advance notice before non-emergency entry — this predates smart locks but sets the norm: entry is supposed to be visible to you.
- Hidden cameras remain flatly illegal anywhere you have a reasonable expectation of privacy (bedroom, bathroom) — see the state-by-state hidden camera law page for your state's citation. California's version explicitly removes "landlord" as a defense (Penal Code §647(j)(3)(B)(i)).
- Smart-lock-specific disclosure law is new and thin. No state currently has a smart-lock notice statute the way some states have one for workplace monitoring. That absence is the honest finding — the SmartRent lawsuit exists because the law hasn't caught up yet, not because the practice is clearly settled either way.
The move-in / lease-renewal check
- Find the disclosure. Search your lease and any smart-home app's terms for "monitor," "log," "data," or "analytics" — the app's own privacy policy, not the lease, is often where the real answer lives.
- Ask directly who can see what. "Who has access to the entry logs and thermostat data, and how long is it kept?" is a normal, unremarkable question for property management.
- Walk the unit with the same sightline-and-power check taught in the room sweep — common areas are one thing, but anything with a lens or mic pointed into your private space is a different, illegal category.
- Separate landlord-installed from your-own devices before assuming either way about who controls the data.
- Photograph the state of any visible device at move-in — the same evidentiary habit as a hotel room's day-one photo.
If something doesn't look right
- Document it — the device, where, and what the lease or app discloses — without disabling or tampering with landlord property.
- Check whether it's in a private space (bedroom, bathroom) versus a common area or your own front door — that distinction is what turns a data-privacy question into a criminal one.
- Raise it with property management first, in writing — most gaps are policy or vendor-default oversights, not deliberate targeting.
- If it's genuinely hidden and in a private space, that's a criminal matter — local police and your state's citation from the hidden-camera-law family.
General information, not legal advice — a tenant-rights attorney or local legal aid office is the right next call, including questions about an active lawsuit like the SmartRent case.
Want the full move-in checklist, offline, room by room? What a landlord can and can't put in your home, what smart locks and thermostats actually log, and the move-in walk that checks it all in one pass.