Smoking is banned in public housing. Excessive noise is frowned on. Complaints from neighbors are the usual way to keep rule-breaking residents in check, but a public housing authority in New Hampshire turned to technology to do the job.
Residents, feeling that the government was spying on them inside their homes, were not happy about it.
In 2024, the public housing authority in Concord, N.H., started installing Minut sensors, a product popular with Airbnb hosts who want to make sure short-term guests aren’t smoking or having loud parties. Around 300 affordable housing apartments in a handful of buildings now have the devices, which initially cost $50, with an additional monthly $7.50 monitoring fee.
“It’s camera-free, and it doesn’t record any sound or listen in to what you say or do,” according to notices posted around the buildings.
But when some residents looked up Minut online, they were aghast at the wide range of data the devices collected: decibel levels, air quality and Bluetooth signals from mobile devices, a proxy for how many people were in a unit at any given time. The device even acts as a motion detector.
Lisa Owens, a University of Massachusetts assistant law professor who has written about surveillance and public housing, said that smart devices had become a “trend” since the Department of Housing and Urban Development banned smoking. “You can see why this would cause not only a sense of unease among residents who are already at risk of falling through whatever safety net exists, but can have real privacy implications as well,” she said.
Tenants in Concord wondered what sorts of noises would trigger alerts. One tenant, whose Minut monitor was installed almost directly over her bed, wrapped it in foil and put it in her freezer. Another asked her landlord — the government — why it was monitoring her movements in her apartment and was told, incorrectly, that the device was not collecting that data. One mother asked her college-aged son to keep it down while playing video games in his bedroom, just in case, because the monitor was right outside his door.
No one wanted to lose access to low-income housing, but it did not seem fair that rental assistance meant living under constant surveillance, residents said. They turned to lawyers at New Hampshire Legal Assistance and the American Civil Liberties Union.
The lawyers sought more information about the monitoring through public records requests and were given the minute-by-minute data collected for each apartment. It amounted to hundreds of millions of sensor readings, with thousands of data points about the noise and motion in each apartment.
“I was dumbfounded,” said Terri King, 65, whose Minut monitor was installed in January in a townhouse she shares with her husband. “I might as well just open my doors and let everybody in and see what I’m doing 24 hours a day.”
Ms. King and her husband were fined $450 for tampering with the device repeatedly. She admits that her husband took the monitor down once to smoke, but she does not know why the device reported other episodes of tampering. They received an eviction notice for failure to pay the fine. The fine was later dropped after a lawyer from New Hampshire Legal Assistance got involved.
On Wednesday, Ms. King and another resident sued the Concord Housing and Redevelopment Authority in state court. Because the agency is a state actor, the complaint calls the installation of the devices “a governmental intrusion upon tenants’ personal and private information, as well as a continuous warrantless government search of tenants’ homes.” The tenants are seeking class action certification on behalf of other residents, and they want the devices removed from their apartments and the data collected about them deleted.
“The bargain shouldn’t be: have access to a roof over your head in exchange for total surveillance of your daily activities,” said Nathan Wessler, an ACLU lawyer who is representing the residents.
The housing authority did not respond to requests for comment.
Christopher Schott, one of the lawyers at the New Hampshire Legal Assistance who is also representing the tenants, said he was worried about the data being available to stalkers, employers or other interested parties via a public records request, revealing when they had been home or away, or up late at night.
Minut, which is not being sued by the tenants, asserts that its technology is not intrusive.
“There is no camera and no audio recording,” Nils Mattisson, chief executive of Minut, said in an email. “Noise is measured as the average decibel level over a minute. It’s just a number and cannot be used to tell what people are doing.”
Minut, based in Sweden, was founded in 2014 to offer a privacy-friendly solution to Airbnb hosts who wanted to monitor guest activity in their homes. In 2024, Airbnb banned indoor surveillance cameras, and encouraged hosts to install noise monitoring devices like Minut’s instead — though Airbnb specifies on its website that they should not be placed in bedrooms.
“Minut Monitors adjacent to tenants’ beds can sense sound and motion data reflecting intimate acts,” the tenants said in their complaint.
Mr. Mattison said that a vast majority of the company’s devices were used in short-term rentals, and that fewer than 5 percent of the sold devices were used in long-term residences.
“Public housing is different and quite new to us — we work with a handful of operators, mainly for cigarette smoke detection,” he said. “Most residents are good neighbors, and the data is there to protect them.”
The post Noise and Motion Monitors in Their Homes? These Tenants Say No. appeared first on New York Times.
