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The home is perceived as an enclave of privacy and retreat from the proliferation of surveillance technologies in the spaces ofpublic and semi-public life. Yet the past years have seen a rapid growth in the development and marketing of smart surveillancesystems for domestic use that promise to protect both family and property. As a result, the understanding of ‘home’ as a place forrespite and as an enclave of autonomy is being challenged as residents find themselves continuously under observation. This studyreads the experience of surveilling and of being surveilled within one’s private domain as different from that of being watchedand monitored on the street, in the mall, or at the office. With the understanding that new assemblages—namely social entitiesconstructed from heterogeneous parts—are formed as humans engage with new technical artefacts, it becomes apparent that aunique tripartite amalgamation of technology, humans and space/place is brought into being by the installation of domesticsurveillance systems by residents in their homes. Moving beyond approaches that examine the social contexts from which thesetechnologies emerge and their cultural consequences, the current study investigates the new ontologies of home, technology, andof surveillance itself rewritten in the automated, smart home. Surveillance is shown as altering the notion of home as place, and of setting the home as the site of action and activity. Moreover, an ontological shift takes place in our understanding of surveillanceas many of its binary paradigms are destabilized.