How to turn your smart home into a haunted haven this Halloween – for free

The scariest part of Halloween this year could be how much we're spending on it. American's are shelling out more than $10 billion – a whopping two billion dollars more than in 2020. We're buying up everything from "Squid Game" costumes and candy corn – both top Halloween searches via Google – to TikTok-trendy must-haves like vintage decorations, scary movies and even good old fashioned snail-mail greeting cards. If the high cost of it all is more trick than treat for you, here are several ways to turn your already smart home into a spook-tacularly genius haunted house. Protect your kids' privacy: Google tool lets minors pull images of themselves from search results An estimated one in every fourpeople in America own a smart speaker and 70% of those are Amazon Echo devices, according to analytics site eMarketer.