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!
Well I have one room where my budgies roam free. I use Airam programmable GU10 RGB lights to simulate day cycle. It’s the only thing that’s “calling home”. Been too lazy to build a local solution. Everything else is run by ESP32 chips and bunch of raspberrys
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.
Gotta love Doctor Ow:
Where do all of these apologetics come from? Why are people so eager to leap to the defense of scammers and their adtech and fintech enablers? Why is there such an impulse to victim-blame?
I think it’s fear: in their hearts, people – especially techies – know that they, too, are vulnerable to these ripoffs, but they don’t want to admit it. They want to convince themselves that the person who got scammed made an easily avoidable mistake, and that they themselves will never make a similar mistake.
Home assistant and Zigbee or Z-Wave to the rescue
same
My smart plugs were carefully chosen so that I could immediately flash them with ESPHome, but that’s because I am not normal. It shouldn’t have to be that way.
What brand/model do you use?
Another good option if you dont wanna flash the S31 plugs yourself is getting your smart home plugs and things from Athom (athom.tech). They have a bunch of devices that come with ESPHome and Tasmota and other firmware preflashed.
Not affiliated at all, just someone who wanted some private and local smart plugs and didnt wanna have to open up smart plugs and flash them manually or fight these manufacturers who lock down the devices more and more.
Sonoff S31 (and I think this might have been the guide I used to flash them), but I think they’ve been discontinued and the replacement model might be more locked-down.
That was the same guide I used! Bought like 20 of these plugs to integrate with HomeAssistant and espHome, added bonus was the energy monitoring.
I’ve got eight of them and am not using them all, but sometimes I worry I should’ve gotten more when I had the chance, just in case.
I miss the '90s, when you could count on new tech to get better instead of worse.
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.)
So many words to defend not wanting to flip a light switch. “Smart” stuff should still exist for accessibility purposes, it would be easier to strictly regulate it if it was used explicitly and exclusively as a medical device, but your average person in nearly all instances can and should be using a light switch manually. Making everything complex and eventually ewaste is trading our collective future for your temporary convenience.
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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.
Honestly, if I were running a PC off it I’d go to the trouble of rewiring to bypass the switch.
Yeah, i deal with this too.
When the options are
- Rewire the outlets in your wall, or
- Add a “smart” layer of abstraction in top,
How are people so surprised that not everyone wants to do electrical work?
I have electrical experience so it’s easy for me, but I can definitely understand not wanting to touch AC power. If you do it wrong you can die or burn your house down. It’s easy and not a lot of variations, but how many people do you know who just can’t follow step by step instructions and the stakes are higher here than just factory reset the device if you mess up.
You can modify the outlet so that only one plug is controlled by the switch. It’s very easy to do, actually. I had to do this in my home for that exact reason, incidentally - the only available outlet for my PC was on the switch. Just modified the outlet, and now only the top plug is controlled by the switch. I have the lamp plugged in the switch half and my PC in the other half.
I watched a video about how to do this, and i would not be comfortable doing it.
I’m glad it is easy for you though!
Easier than replacing a light switch, which I’ve also done. And then had to re-do when I accidentally put it in upside down. The main thing about doing any minor electrical work is to ALWAYS, ALWAYS, ALWAYS turn off the power at the breaker box and ensure it is off before you start. Better to be cautious than a crispy critter, lol
I have a similar but different issue. These things are good.
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.
The key benefit of smart home tech isn’t to control stuff with an app instead of a switch, it’s to automate it so you don’t have to do anything at all.
Other than the thermostat, I can’t think of anything in my home that I want to change automatically without manual intervention.
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.
I think you just described my coffee maker that I got from Costco. That’s a lot of extra steps to make a device that already exists.
I have that same Cuisinart from Costco, and the built-in program does just fine itself. There also must be a battery because the clock doesn’t lose time when the power goes out
Yes, a coffee maker that connects to the internet does exist, usually for more than I spent on everything involved, and also usually with its own headaches.
I find that usually those devices all want their OWN app installed, so instead of just your home assistant, you have HA, and the Mr Coffee app, and the GE app, and whatever else, each with their own requests for telemetry and whatnot.
Building your own out of simple devices gives you more control and an easier vector to secure.
But in your use case why does the coffee maker have to connect to the internet?
It doesn’t HAVE to be but it makes it easy to have a schedule that only runs in certain days and it allows me to turn it on from the other room.
The challenge is not the light switch. The challenge is not stubbing your toe on the way to the bed.
You tell that to my kids 😂
No, but app-controlled lights are probably also the least useful aspect of a smarthome setup.
I have lived in 2 locations with the light switch at the front door, doesn’t control the entry lights. I was forced to use smart bulbs to keep from walking into a pitch black house.
I just turned on my office light within Snap, an open source environment to teach kid programming, literally minutes ago. I didn’t even know that was possible 1h ago.
As others pointed out the point isn’t to replace a switch, the point is to get efficient or creative or both with your home. Of course if your mind can handle a switch with a light bulb, no need to do more.
PS: no data left my home, no WiFi requirement, no third-party proprietary app. Sure most “Smart Home” setup are horrible in many ways, both privacy and security, but it’s not because the most popular way sucks that all ways do.
Not all of us 😏
the answer is Yes we are.
It’s funny how this refutes Betteridge’s law of headlines
I’ve always felt like the apps stuffed full of telemetry that have access to a lot of data on my phone are the most concerning part. It’s annoying too that the devices themselves phone home.
GrapheneOS has a built in network “Kill Switch” for each app individually on your phone.
As soon as a app is installed it you are prompted to grant network access to the app, you can also choose to restrict it after the fact as well.
There are also some other apps on Android that do the same that I have come across, but I have gotten pretty used to what GrapheneOS offers me now built in.
This is useful for restricting network access for keyboard, galary, game, or emulator apps for example.
Downside is the apps need internet/network access to control the smart home devices.
I run pretty much all ESPHome or Tasmota devices since there’s no app required, and it’s all LAN based communication. But the complexity is certainly very high for those compared to off the shelf stuff.
I wanted to be able to turn a light off and on from two switches, in a room that only has one switch.
I was able to do this with wireless switches that don’t connect to any server.
Besides the privacy malus, i don’t need another hobby (home automation)
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.
I have people in myblife who say ice already sold out to Google might as well continue using them. I don’t fight them they can do what they want.
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.
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.
I knew and I didn’t care still don’t about some things. And I know others who have an idea but don’t care. I’d say right now I’m more anti american then anything else aobtrying to move away from their companies.
American companies are, easily, 90%+ of this shit, so I think you’re on the right path.
Smart home stuff is dominated by Tuya, which is Chinese. Even a lot of the american branded stuff is Tuya rebranded. Phillips hue is Netherlands based, and from a quick look isn’t tuya. IKEA is also not tuya. The rest, I would basically guarantee are all tuya based.
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
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.
My experience is the opposite they know and they don’t care.
They’re like maga – they think they know, but will never truly know until it bites them in the ass like the Latinos that voted for trump and ended up facing deportation because if it.
And even then it’ll take a lot of time and continued pain to get them to acknowledge it – also like the Latinos for trump. Lol
I mean, you can – that’s what consumer protection regulations are for. It’s why people can’t sell themselves into slavery even I’d they’re stupid enough to want to, for example.
We could do things like, say, entirely outlawing closed-source software in smart home tech, if our government weren’t usurped by oligarchs.
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.
