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Comment by notheguyouthink | Hacker News Reader

I mean, i love all these tools, i just don't want them to have any form of internet access.

It's why i'm building my home cloud and automation system, but only doing so if the devices don't leave my firewall. I enjoy the tech, i enjoy the complication (to a degree), it's fun gadget stuff, it's nifty. However i do not trust them to keep my information safe, even if i trusted them to not misuse it themselves (which i don't).

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>> I mean, i love all these tools, i just don't want them to have any form of internet access.

I've come to the realisation that the only way I will have a 'home of the future' is if I build it myself and keep it offline. I love lots of the IOT products and when they eventually come down in price they would be no brainers. But my privacy isn't worth the benefit they provide.

The home isn't a castle anymore. It's a SCIF.

$199 device that sends data to some servers elsewhere and gets the job done in seconds

$2000 device that takes up space and electricity to do the same thing, but in minutes

I personally like the second option a lot better, I wish we had an open source version of all the google apps that did it's own ML on your own servers.

Except most of the IoT devices on market would do the same thing for about same price without the cloud. The only problem the clouds solves for users is not having to know how to set up a VPN so that their shitty app can view mostly meaningless pseudo-charts when the user is away from home. But in exchange for that, you give the vendors lots of data to resell, and the ability to brick your devices remotely.

SaaS model being ported to hardware is probably the single most user-hostile development I've seen in recent years in tech.

Outlaw the kind of data collection and abuse that keeps these services alive and plenty of reasonably-priced paid encrypted-cloud and/or locally-hosted options for all kinds of these free spying-enabled services would pop up quickly. The spy-vertising economy, which lives mostly on people not realizing just how bad it is and coordination problems in trying to counter it, makes it impractical to compete using other business models.

There's a much more immediately practical reason to keep it in-firewall as well: if the utility company accidentally cuts a fiber line outside my house, I don't want to be suddenly unable to turn off my hallway light.

Maybe building codes could spec that home automation devices must have local controls.

The companies aren't going to do it without regulation.

Or maybe people stop building all this shit in the cloud?

Part of my argument there is that it isn't going to happen without regulation.

Wait, so now building codes are going to get involved with what I run in my house after it is built and inspected? That doesn't sound like building codes. If anything, regulation from the FCC or someone else would be more uh, fitting.

Sure, I was thinking of things like lights supporting local control. I guess I'd try to write it so that a phone app talking to the light counted as passing the rule, as long as it worked without an internet connection.

I don't see how it is a problem for simple rules like "Installed lights must always be controllable from inside the premises" to be code.

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