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Comment by dirkg | Hacker News Reader

This sort of thing is becoming the norm, and will become the norm with IoT. When every device is connected and has a computer, it can and will have the ability to be locked down, intercepted and monitored remotely.

People don't know or care about privacy, that's been amply proven, they just want rhetoric.

This is basically lending equipment while paying full price. We've gotten used to it with software, phones etc. Its absolutely ridiculous they have to sign agreements that exempt the company from any wrongdoing, and aren't allowed to perform basic repairs.

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What you are (accurately) describing is the high end of the IoT space. The low end is almost equally disconcerting but in the other direction: no updates, no responsibility and wildly vulnerable to attack.

I find it cost effective to simply create a 2nd vlan at home for IOT use. It has no gateway for internet access and I can only access it from local devices or over my VPN. This way I can use inexpensive devices without the worry.

> I find it cost effective to simply create a 2nd vlan at home for IOT use

How do you find that this meshes with devices that require Internet access to function?

I use it currently for security cameras as well as some lighting fixtures and electrical sockets. For the lighting and electrical I use zwave products and VM on my home server with a USB zwave dongle as the controller. This won't work for a product that has a "cloud" access requirement but it works fine for my purpose. I wouldn't buy a security camera that uploaded images of what I'm up to in my home to anyplace, nor would I use lights that required a AWS instance to be up to turn on. It takes some research before buying to know its going to work but Amazon's returns department has been good to me when the description was unclear. Its much more work than you can expect the average consumer to put in but at this point in my career my money is worth more than my time.

> create a 2nd vlan

That's only a temporary workaround. SoCs with an integrated LTE modem have been available for a while (e.g. Samsung Exynos). In the near future, manufacturers will try to remove even the ability to corral IoT spyw^H^H^H^H"smart" to the local network.

On the other hand, the low end is easily hackable (in both senses of the word) so at least you could fix the problems yourself if you were so inclined.

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