The Internet of things you inherit or leave behind

medium.com

60 points·interesse··4 comments

Very thought-provoking read. My first impulse is that I would rip out anything 'smart' in a place I buy and replace it, and not use anything 'smart' in a place I'm renting — but I've been living in my home for over a decade, and I'm wealthy enough that I can imagine replacing a lot of stuff if I wanted to.

But I can imagine a lot of folks not wanting to replace their thermostats, their refrigerators &c., esp. after spending money to move in.

It's going to be a problem, for as long as people do not own and cannot control the devices they rely on for life support.

I'm of course speaking from my own very limited experience, but has the Internet of Things actually materialized? Smart devices still seem far from ubiquitous, and I can't imagine the average consumer actually bothering to figure out how to hookup up their microwave to the internet.

An interesting article and a fascinating perspective. What happens when the smarts in your "smart home" don't necessarily answer to you?

That's really the crux of the whole idea, in my opinion. Even if IoT hasn't really materialized in any meaningful way yet, the fact of the matter is that the way current internet technologies work, there will be multiple parties inserted into the process, and none of them will be working for you. I just look at how blindingly difficult it is to even understand what my phone is doing, let alone control it, and that's all I need to know that I don't want _anything_ to do with IoT.

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