If you receive a smart gift this Christmas there are a few steps to take before just turning it on and using away, by simply doing this you could be giving away a tonne of unnecessary personal information to the manufacturer. 

This Christmas, families will be unwrapping various internet-connected devices, and, knowingly or not, wiring up their homes for levels of surveillance rarely seen outside the Soviet bloc.

Follow these tips to control your pricey as best you can.

• Don't give up rights you don't need to.

•  Look for boxes to uncheck, prompts to decline and settings to change; that will limit the technology to doing what you bought it for, rather than what the company that made it hopes you will let it do.

• Dive into the settings.

•  So don’t just accept the default settings when you first turn on your smart humidifier. Take a second, or five, to look into the settings of your new devices, and see how much control they give you. You will almost certainly be able to put tighter controls on how your data is used (do you really want personalised adverts?) and you may find ways to improve the user experience as well.

• Know when to give up.

• Some gifts aren’t salvageable. Your tech-obsessed brother may have thought the bear with a camera in its nose was cute for your new baby, but, before the company fixed a breach, it allowed hackers to steal children’s names, birthdates and genders, along with other data.