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Comment by alexmingoia | Hacker News Reader

The principal reason devices need to be connected is so that business can hold your devices ransom and charge you money to use them.

Turn on lights with a phone? No need for Internet.

Open doors with a fingerprint? No need for Internet.

An auto-adjusting energy-saving thermostat? No need for Internet.

A fridge that knows the milk is low? No need for Internet.

Charge people money to use their toaster? You need the Internet for that.

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Completely agree except the light argument -- having my lights cloud connected allows me to control them remotely. The main use for this is for time or sunrise/sunset scheduling. However you could quite easily architecture this without cloud connectivity, it seems easiest to keep the bulb dumb and keep the 'smarts' elsewhere (whether that's on a phone locally or a server in the cloud).

Scheduling isn't stock market, you don't need a live feed for that. All such a bulb needs is an accurate date and time source - the rest, including (if you also add one-time geographical area input) the sunrise/sunset times can be determined with a little bit of trivial math on the uC that said "smart" bulb already has.

All that IoT stuff doesn't need Internet access. Hell, most of it doesn't need much of a network at all, but just having them default to intranet would deliver all the value without the problems (and the rent-seeking).

I would say the principal reason they need to be connected is because consumers expect it. But yes, some unscrupulous businesses will take advantage of that. People need to vote with their money and not buy from companies that do this.

Consumers don't expect it, but they are being told they should. That's marketing at work, literally trying to create the market for this shit-engineering non-solutions.

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