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Comment by k-mcgrady | Hacker News Reader

>> 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.

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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.

$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.

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

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