A man who got kicked off a service because of an alleged remark.
This is the reason my house has:
- mechanical locks
- mechanical windows
- routers using OpenWRT
- no smart home crap
- no Alexa/Google Assistant/…
- no internet connected thermostats
Fwiw, I think using a self hosted home automation setup (shout out to home assistant) paired with smart devices that don’t use internet (e.g. zigbee, zwave, or matter once it comes out) can allow you to have a smart home without these kinds of fears.
That said, I would definitely agree to using mechanical locks. Although a monitored smart security system is probably still a good idea - you’re letting a company virtually enter your house, but you can’t rely on a self hosted solution to notify you when your power goes out, for example.
This, I have plenty of smart home stuff all run locally, and every external call is something I can control and disable. Having a smart home isn’t inherently the problem; outsourcing all the computation to cloud servers run by unaccountable corporations is the problem
My experience from watching lockpicking lawyer is that locks are just social niceties that tell others ‘please don’t go here’ and have no real ability to stop anyone who doesn’t care. Other than the owner who gets locked out by forgetting their own key of course.
Unless I’m mistaken, don’t HomeKit compatible devices need to be local-first too? I remember reading that if I switch my Ecobee thermostat to HomeKit (via HomeAssistant’s bridge), it will use local control instead. It’s on my todo list but I just haven’t done it yet.
I think this thread about Ecobee and HomeKit was where I started…
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Shameless plug for Home Assistant, here. Everything is controlled locally (unless you pay for their internet pass through service which is basically just a relay), most brands of smart devices are supported, you have extreme customization capabilities, and it’s all open source.
Plus, it can run on pretty much anything.
Shameless plug for just using your little fingies to operate the light switches and thermostats. Everything is controlled locally and you only have to pay for the light and the switch (fingers should be included in your default setup)
Controller locally except that one case - also unless you add devices that are cloud controlled (most things that say they are Alexa-compatible, most Wifi things, etc). Which a lot of people may not realize, and it’s a LOT of things). But is totally up to people to use, and there’s often a way to make (or hack) those things to be local-only.
Home Assistant really is best-in-class though for most Home Automation things. It’s super super powerful and supports virtually EVERYTHING, especially if you can put in a little work. And for medium/advanced users, it’s peerless.
They just still have a really long way to go to be as user-friendly as it should be. Even for “advanced” users.
On one side, critics lambasted Jackson as a dupe for having smart devices in the first place; […]
Yah … that.
Having smart devices isn’t dumb, but you have to implement them properly.
It’s dumb to hand control of your smart home over to a 3rd party, though.
He may have made a mistake but his heart seems to be in the right place. Even if not before, it is now. His stance is commendable. Let’s allow people to get better than they were before.
If I ever get into smart home crap, I’ll definitely be aiming for a local network solution >_>
Go Home Assistant. They’re getting closer to having an offline voice assistant too, so soon you won’t need to use rhasspy or another open source solution.
I’m in the process of developing a whole home HAL9000 system.
Ikea’s line of smart home stuff is the best generally available consumer friendly smart home stuff I’ve seen so far. All zigbee based, hub isn’t required, has local control and open APIs.
