Mainstream tech advice treats cheap Wi-Fi smart plugs as harmless convenience, totally glossing over how much telemetry leaks out to overseas cloud servers by default.
Expecting casual users to set up VLANs and firewall drop rules just to stop a £10 light bulb from phoning home is a bit of a joke.
True privacy means local control without corporate middlemen.
Original content by The Unknown Universe, written by a human and not AI generated!
Some well-trained bootlickers showing up here.
When you blame exploited users for “volunteering to get exploited”, you’re doing free PR for the exploiters.
I was always tempted by the idea of controlling my house in a more convenient way. But every time I try and plan all the things I’d make smart, I always end up not doing anything because it’s either all or nothing: when I imagine something I use regularly at home that is not “connected” while other stuff is, it frustrates me immensely.
There are some use cases for accessibility or for making a “dumb” appliance piece a bit smarter (like turning on an espresso machine to pre-heat it every workday morning). Or, like others noticed, fixing a very particular problem like turning on only one light bulb from a row at night.
Good to see some progress in this area though, but it’s still the same shit most people don’t really need. At least in a way it’s implemented today. I want my stuff stupid and reliable.
Seems like even more reason to only use something like Z-Wave in an isolated network.
The Smart Home Trap: Is It Really Too Difficult To Use A Light Switch?
The Internet Person Challenge: imagine a context you haven’t yet experienced.
Impossible.
The internet was supposed to open our minds by letting us see the incredible diversity of how other people live their lives, but all we do 90% of the time is try to dunk on complete strangers (often imaginary ones, at that!) for not living exactly the same way.
I’ve met enough people that need accommodations to know that I have a horrible intuition about what’s going to be easy or hard for someone to do, and what will help or not.
IMO just let people do their thing. They know themselves better than you do.
(And if you see a story about how they’re getting exploited by an evil megacorp, and you feel the impulse to victim-blame, you can always just hit yourself in the dick with a hammer instead.)
I think opening an app to turn on a lamp is more work than it’s worth. We actually avoid anything that requires an app at this point.
I have a few “smart” plugs. I generally don’t use the app to turn them off or on, but being able to schedule them is what I think makes them valuable.
I bought the cheapest coffeemaker I could find that has a physical switch and plugged it into a smart switch so that it turns on every morning, Monday through Friday, at a specific time. On the weekends I do use the app because I can start the coffee brewing while I am still in bed and it will be ready when I get downstairs.
Could all of this be done without an IoT device? Yes, in college I had one of those old school mechanical timer switches to do the same thing. It is just that now I get more control over how it works.
The point of these isn’t just to “use an app” to do things you could easily do yourself, but to get additional functionality from an app that simply pushing a button couldn’t do.
yes, actually.
the one of the switches in my office controls one of the only outlets, which has a pc plugged into it. so yes, a zigbee smart bulb is the better option than just flipping the switch. it’s a single widget on my phone, and there’s a remote, and i can control it from my pc. it just runs off home assistant, there’s no internet involved, and i don’t even have to use the wifi for it.
i swear you people just invent difficulty out of nothing.
i swear you people just invent difficulty out of nothing.
Says the guy intentionally running a computer off a switched outlet and complaining about how hard that makes things
In my house, the switched outlets are the only grounded ones on the second floor. Kind of a no-win proposition there.
The challenge is not the light switch. The challenge is not stubbing your toe on the way to the bed.
No, but app-controlled lights are probably also the least useful aspect of a smarthome setup.
You tell that to my kids 😂
Casual users don’t need to setup vlans, because they simply don’t care.
There is no point hand-wringing about this, they don’t care, they don’t need our help for this.
Ah, the deregulation mindset.
“If the user is unaware of it, does it really matter if they are harmed by it?”
One of the main points of society as a whole is protecting the people living in it, even if they don’t know they are being harmed/exploited/poisoned/etc…
There is nothing nothing to be done. Casual users will literally install wiretaps in their own homes.
You cant help people who dont want or care for the help.
You cant help people who dont want or care for the help.
most are just intentionally made ignorant of why they should care and will start to care once informed of how it impacts them personally.
they’re like mini-republicans in that respect – they dgaf until it impacts them personally.
I believe that you are both correct. 8 to 10 years ago I realized how much data these companies and governments gather about me, and it scared the shit out of me. I was not aware before that, so I had Alexas all over my house, smart devices, a Samsung SmartThings, the works.
Then my slow walk to privacy started. My home is fully automated now, down to the sprinklers, but it’s all via Home Assistant, frigate for my cameras (inside home assistant), not one of my IoT devices has access to the internet, they live in an isolated VLAN, and I haven’t had any mainstream social network account or WhatsApp for over 8 years now.
The fact is that a lot people don’t care because they don’t know, like me back then, but finally knowing is what jump-started this path.
I do agree that there’s no helping someone that doesn’t want help, that’s a hard fact, but if we do move this information around, we stand to “cure a few normies” along the way.
Holy shit. I didn’t know it was possible to acknowledge more than one perspective. You just blew my mind, man.
Kidding. Thank you for actually thinking non-binarily
A few years ago I got some smart bulbs and plugs and wasn’t really aware about any of this and privacy didn’t even cross my mind
Some of us do care when we find out, but maybe caring starts you down a path of no longer being a “casual user”
All my WiFi smart devices are now on a VLAN with no internet access and controlled locally by Home Assistant through with local Tuya integration
I too, many years ago now started my smart home journey with cheap Tuya devices and didn’t know any better. The more I used Home Assistant the further I got down the rabbit hole and learnt about privacy. Now I am a privacy advocate and have a dedicated blog 🤓
You kinda prove my point. Those who care will sell their bulbs or learn vlans. Everyone else won’t.
