Builders Ditch Nest After Google Ties Devices to Digital Assistant | Hacker News Reader

Builders Ditch Nest After Google Ties Devices to Digital Assistant

bloomberg.com

181 pointsMBCook121 comments

Nest has been so terribly mismanaged seemingly from the beginning of the acquisition; has there been any management level change to compensate for the poor execution?

I really like the look of the Nest thermometer, but I definitely don't want Google in control of anything in my house, or listening to anything in my house, with how the manage this stuff.

If I do automate anything, I will be going with Home Assistant, even though I kind of despise home rolling these sorts of things. I don't trust any of the major players, and their recent behavior and lack of care for the user makes me nervous for the future of tech.

Management at big companies like Google is about protecting your $1M+ paycheck a year and not about innovation. You don’t rock the boat and you don’t stick your neck out. These companies are not hungry, they are simply greedy.

You're underestimating the complexity of the game. It's not certain that not sticking your neck out protects your paycheck or the company's profits. Some other company or employee may be willing to take more risk and succeed.

https://www.cio.com/article/2379013/satya-nadella-to-succeed...

https://www.cnet.com/news/google-buys-android/

This. Any company pass a certain size has a legion of upper, and middle manglers whose sole responsibility is risk management, and paramount to anything is the risk to the personal wealth and progression of said manager. There is very little incentive to 'innovate'.

The beautiful thing about this is that any half-bright kid could come along and kick these executives to the curb. There is zero technical barrier to entry in home automation products; the technology is dead simple. The only problem is that you cannot get conventional VCs to fund it because the only way to achieve high-growth and a rapid 10x exit is to spy on people. But if capital were available for moderate-growth, sustaining companies, privacy-respecting HA would be an easy market to penetrate.

> But if capital were available for moderate-growth, sustaining companies, privacy-respecting HA would be an easy market to penetrate.

There is, you’ve described a small business loan. The problem is that you can’t be entering a new field. No investor wants to give money for a high risk, low return investment.

It’s a real shame we didn’t get to see Dropcam reach it’s potential.

Many years later, I’m still angry that Google took my functioning service, subtracted features from it, and replaced it with their seemingly always half-broken one. RIP Dropcam.

I suspect that google bought nest as a beachhead for creating a "house platform"

Having google in your house means that it makes sense for an en user to have an android phone, a google account. If you make the walled garden nice enough, you'll never want to leave.

Or if you make people invest enough in it, its to expensive or painful to leave.

As HA requires a bit of work to setup, its always going to be for tinkerers (unless its packaged and supported by a third party)

Google should have bought Wyze or Iris by Lowes, the Nest Protect offerings are very underwhelming (no motion detectors, the door sensors don't double as temperature sensors like most Z-Wave sensors).

This kind of sounds like what governments do. Or civilization in general.

Its helpful to approach https://www.home-assistant.io/hassio/ as you would a moderately complex home entertainment system, with a smart tv, a apple tv, a blueray player, playstation, a recorder all managed via a AVR with a 'smart' remote. You are going to spend a few hours setting it up in the beginning.

The economic incentives for home automation are aligned to send them the way of the SpyTV fiasco [0]. Whatever brand you choose, it will spy on you sooner or later. Our speech is no longer private within the confines or our own homes. Soon, our heart beats too will become game for the creeps of the world [1].

This needs to stop. We need laws to keep internet-connected devices from spying on us in our own homes. We need an option to purchase internet-free devices. We need legislation now, as the wireless internet of things [5G] is coming online and the last drop of control we had, to not give the wifi password to the spy devices, will be taken away from us.

[0] https://www.cnet.com/how-to/your-tv-is-probably-tracking-you...

[1] https://atap.google.com/soli/

Just buy Zigbee and ZWave based home automation products. People are hyperfocused on Wifi products that end up spying on you because that's all they know. Zigbee and Zwave products have no capability to connect to the internet. They must go to a zigbee/zwave router of some sorts. There's a few vendors selling them that definitely aren't Amazon or Google and some that even run entirely internal to your network and some that are cloud based.

Granted I don't know a ton about Zigbee other than it's the approved wireless standard for BACnet, but I'm glad to see comments like this. It's seemed silly to me that all of this home automation stuff gets marketed as new and revolutionary when it's just balkanized and proprietary implementations of technology that's been in commercial buildings for decades. BACnet seems to have become the defacto standard in serious building automation. It's ridiculous that this home automation market seems to ignore a tried and true open standard for all this proprietary nonsense.

I don’t see how buying other products will help stop privacy abuses.

Great point. We need to make spying costly though a 2 pronged strategy:

* Develop technology that makes it expensive to spy.

* Pass legislation that makes it expensive to spy.

Bad actors will be still spying, but hopefully we can economically contain the spy activity to high profile targets, instead of mass deploy it for everyone.

What about rejecting this inane trend toward home automation entirely?

In most homes you can realize 99% of the energy savings and convenience of a Nest thermostat with an $50 7-day programmable box. Set it up and forget it entirely; it should just blend into the background. I can't think of a situation it hasn't "handled" for me - my house is a reasonable temperature day and night, my gas bills are within the expected range. If perhaps I spend an hour cold or nobody enjoys an hour of produced warmth due to a routine change, it's not a big deal.

I cannot imagine wanting to check my thermostat remotely, or have it connect to the Internet, or _track my presence_ and presumably report it to third party data gathering monstrosities. To give up such a huge piece of information (to yet another company, assuming all the phone-related companies already know this...) without any real "payment" for it besides a self-adjusting thermostat strikes me as pretty mad - especially when I can't see any real reason why such a device even needs to be on the Internet at all to accomplish that.

Internet connected lightbulbs? Smart locks? Solutions waiting for problems, most of them badly built, insecure, and probably spying on you in multiple ways. More expensive than they should be, never really providing you much beyond the sort of creature comforts that a more capable person can safely disdain as being for the overly soft and comfortable set.

That said, I concur that using a local bus like this makes the most sense if you must do this, but consider what you're spending your money and your time on. I think a lot of this stems from some latent desire to simulate the James Bond / Ladies Man 70's vibe with the remote control that dims the lights, puts the Barry White on, and converts the couch into a bed. It's cheesy and your guests aren't as impressed as you think they are.

It's not unreasonable to want various subsystems of the house to work cooperatively, or even to have some internet connectivity (although I personally would avoid products that use it).

E.g. having your security system (my smart home implementation would include a data diode so the home automation cannot effect the house's security posture) notify the HVAC controller that no one's home so it can turn off the air conditioning, and have the HVAC controller manage the motorized blinds / curtains / etc. so that whichever side of the house is currently facing the sun has the blinds half or fully closed to control the temperature passively. And to know that I usually get home at a certain time (I'm not overly comfortable with GPS tracking options) and start managing house temperature again ~20m before I get home so it's comfortable when I arrive.

I'd like my house to automatically close all of my blinds and turn on the interior lighting at sundown each day (not at a fixed time each day as simple controllers do - I want it referring to a pre-computed almanac or dynamically figuring out when the individual sun up / down times for each day are. Maybe integrated with a solar panel system so it can detect when energy output starts to ramp up and use that as the sunup/down times, although that doesn't account for cloud cover).

Imagine having a garden irrigation controller that polls rain radar data from the local weather bureau and uses it (along with a local weather station) to decide whether to hold off on watering the plants, in case it rains. And using the local weather station to decide how much (if any) watering is needed.

I don't want a smart home that does "ladies man" type stuff as you describe - I want a smart home that actively makes my life easier, by taking care of the little things that only cost a few minutes each day to do (watering the lawn, closing blinds, ...) but waste a lot of time in aggregate.

> E.g. having your security system (my smart home implementation would include a data diode so the home automation cannot effect the house's security posture) notify the HVAC controller that no one's home so it can turn off the air conditioning

Or you could press a button on your way out of the house, and not have to have an array of finicky sensors and interacting components make these decisions for you. Like, seriously, a solution waiting for a problem

>and have the HVAC controller manage the motorized blinds / curtains / etc. so that whichever side of the house is currently facing the sun has the blinds half or fully closed to control the temperature passively.

You have _motorized blinds_? Seriously, how big is your house that this isn't just a two-minute thing you do to go and close the blinds? Alternately, how lazy do you have to be for this to be something you'd invest thousands of dollars into? Can't even fathom how motorized blinds will hold up to a decade of children abusing them... though, most of the bugmen I've seen who get seriously into home automation are childless.

> And to know that I usually get home at a certain time (I'm not overly comfortable with GPS tracking options) and start managing house temperature again ~20m before I get home so it's comfortable when I arrive.

That's what my $50 programmable thermostat does. Do you really get home at totally different times every single day, to the point where no 7-day timer routine is sufficient? To the point where (well, not you, but others) consider the idea of letting a bunch of random companies GPS-track them for this purpose? Mindblowing.

> I'd like my house to automatically close all of my blinds and turn on the interior lighting at sundown each day

Or you could just turn on a light when you need it. Is the wall such a long walk away? Seriously. You'd invest hundreds into each lightswitch so you can control it from your phone, only for it to not work the moment you want to show it off to someone... versus just using the simple, economical, $2 lightswitch that has become a complete commodity item available everywhere and easily designed to last for a hundred years?

Talk about a sustainability nightmare.

> Imagine having a garden irrigation controller that polls rain radar data from the local weather bureau and uses it (along with a local weather station) to decide whether to hold off on watering the plants, in case it rains. And using the local weather station to decide how much (if any) watering is needed.

Imagine missing the point of gardening to the extent that you automate the whole thing instead of actually taking the time to do it, and reaping the psychological benefits of doing so.

> I want a smart home that actively makes my life easier,

It honestly doesn't sound like your life started "harder" if this is the kind of thing you think makes it easier.

>Or you could press a button on your way out of the house, and not have to have an array of finicky sensors and interacting components make these decisions for you.

To clarify: I wouldn't be using the security sensors (PIR or whatnot) to control HVAC - I'd like to have the security system send a simple "system armed" message to the smarthome controller.

>Seriously, how big is your house that this isn't just a two-minute thing you do to go and close the blinds? Alternately, how lazy do you have to be for this to be something you'd invest thousands of dollars into?

Two minutes a day over the course of a year is ~12 hours of your life wasted. Not big, but annoying enough that I'd like to automate it.

>Or you could just turn on a light when you need it. Is the wall such a long walk away? Seriously. You'd invest hundreds into each lightswitch so you can control it from your phone, only for it to not work the moment you want to show it off to someone

Again, none of this is neccesary. It's purely a convenience thing. It would be nice to e.g. turn off my room light from bed without getting up to do so. That said, while it's certainly not cheap home automation with Z-wave or isteon is getting more affordable as time goes by, and you don't have to upgrade your entire house in one pass.

>Imagine missing the point of gardening to the extent that you automate the whole thing instead of actually taking the time to do it, and reaping the psychological benefits of doing so.

I'm not talking about fully automating the weeding etc., but being able to go away for a couple of weeks and know that the garden is watering itself is good for peace of mind. I don't garden for relaxation, I'm more concerned about making sure my lawn and trees don't die.

My current lawn watering setup involves a bunch of manual intervention to move drip hoses around and such, and in the Australian summer you often have to water the garden every day or two to prevent damage. Plus there are some awkward spots where I have to bucket water and have been meaning to put in a proper irrigation system.

>It honestly doesn't sound like your life started "harder" if this is the kind of thing you think makes it easier.

This is fair and I freely admit this is all about convenience, not neccesity.

You don't see any benefit in being able to remotely access your thermostat or anything else in your house?

Since my place is not zoned ideally, it is very common to change the thermostat multiple times a day. Also, it is nice to not have to leave the AC running if we leave and forget to adjust it.

As for lights, the same applies, especially with kids. Being able to turn off all the lights at night with one button, rather than going through the house to turn everything off right before bed when you are tired or right before leaving when you are late is a nice and commonly used benefit.

> You don't see any benefit in being able to remotely access your thermostat or anything else in your house?

Not really. Maybe security cameras if I lived somewhere shady enough to need them.

> eing able to turn off all the lights at night with one button, rather than going through the house to turn everything off right before bed when you are tired or right before leaving when you are late is a nice and commonly used benefit.

I've got kids. I would like to think they've made me _less_ lazy.

I use the turning-off-the-lights patrol to ensure that windows are closed, taps are off, appliances are off, fridge is shut properly, and so forth.

Granted I don’t have kids, but my experience with families who have kids and home automation is that you have to be better at Internet security than your kids or they end up controlling everything in ways you don’t really want.

And then there’s the vulnerabilities: if you can remotely control your home, who else can?

I am not a security expert. My hobby is playing computer games about spaceships. I don’t get a thrill or a sense of satisfaction from finding and closing security holes in my personal networks.

From my perspective the best place for home automation devices is as napkin sketches on the design room floor.

Thank god someone else actually agreed with me on this, I thought I was just tilting at windmills here

> Soon, our heart beats too will become game for the creeps of the world [1].

Isn't it too late for that? Every $15 heart rate monitoring fitness band is already doing that, along with Wear OS watches.

opt-in vs. opt-amish.

99% of the population doesn't wear fitness bands and doesn't need one. Most those that do have a fitness band don't wear it at all times.

With SOLI, everyone that is in the neighborhood of a SOLI-enabled device, that is a mobile phone, or, soon, a SpyNEST heating control, or SpyTV, or SpyFridge, or a SpyCar, will have their heartbeats monitored 24/7.

Changing the world from monitoring 1% of the population to monitoring 99% of the population. That's the story of Google/SiliconValley, from NielsenRatings-to-GoogleAnalytics, all the way to Fitbit-to-SOLI.

Not only do they now force you to have a Google account and Google Assistant (via Android or Google Home) to take full advantage of your Nest now, but they also pretty much gutted the API in the name of "privacy." Ironic.

I was looking to play with my historical data to try and figure out how my two heating and cooling systems were interacting, but that data is no longer available to non-grandfathered developers. The only way to access my own data from my super-technologically-advanced-device-owned-by-Google is by ordering a dump of CSV files.

I don't think anyone in the tech world believes Google killed integration features in the name of privacy.

The fact that that's the PR spin they chose points to how poorly managed the entire division must be.

If you want more control, just say it.

It's definitely a convenient excuse if you just want to be lazy. I certainly can't imagine how any Nest developer could abuse my private data any worse than Google already does.

God forbid any third party should find out -- with my permission! -- what my thermostat was set to last Monday.

you have only yourself to be angry with

How so? I bought into Nest long before it was bought by Google. Should I have been able to predict all this somehow?

I finished setting up a pile of Nest thermostats and cameras about a month before Google killed “works with Nest”. Am now planning to remove all of the Nest products. Haven't figured out what to replace the cameras with (I do not want to go through this again with another vendor). The Nest thermostats were great for the first couple of years we had them and we saw some measurable savings on heating and cooling. Killing off the automation options via IFTTT kills the utility of the thermostats for me (and Google Assistant is useless as a replacement if your primary Google accounts are G Suite accounts).

I use Wyze cameras for baby monitors, home security, etc., and I’ve been pretty happy with them. They’re cheap enough that you can throw a camera at pretty much any idea. They are a cloud-based product so they come with all of the associated privacy concerns, but if you were using Nest then that’s maybe not a huge deal. Not affiliated with the company, just relatively pleased with the products.

Same. I use their cameras and now their motion detectors. They are cheap and work well. Their IR filters jam regularly though on the cameras, giving everything a blindingly purple shade unless you just have IR/night mode on at all times. Small price to pay for the cost of the camera I guess.

The Wyze cams are very cheap and you might be able to use them locally as normal network cameras without any internet connection.

A year or two ago I looked into this and there was a 'jailbreak' to load different firmware onto it, but I think it stopped being functional due to updates. However, I have heard things about an official offline firmware being released by Wyze which you may want to look into.

Awesome, that'd be huge. Only issue with them are the SD cards being the canonical place to store footage... so if the criminal (or weather event) destroys the cameras.... not so useful.

Fire Phone notwithstanding, Amazon seems to offer good long-term support for their devices. I've been very pleased with my e-Ink Kindles, first-gen FireTV, and first-gen Alexa. I expect the Amazon Cloud Camera to have a similarly lengthy product lifetime.

Ubiquity has some nice cameras. They operate on the LAN only. Not sure whether they have any alerting/movement detection or IFTT capabilities though.

The Ubiquity cameras are nice! They do offer remote access, which I used to monitor 3D printers and chickens from afar. I’m not sure if remote access comes with the cameras or requires their “cloud key” device, which we also have.

Comes with. They’re actually fairly separated from the rest of Ubiquiti’s offerings. I have seven cameras currently and would like to add a few more.

There’s an ongoing migration of ubiquiti video hardware to “unifi protect” which requires their hardware NVR (cloud key gen2+) to run. Of course remote access is possible, but you can’t self host the new software (at least for now).

The remote access comes with it. The footage is stored locally and their remote access acts as a proxy.

Use normal network enabled cameras and make them remote accessible via a Tor hidden service: https://github.com/n8fr8/talks/blob/master/onion_things/Inte...

Out of curiousity, what benefits does Tor bring here? Wouldn't a domain + VPN (or simply HTTPS + password protection) + a restrictive firewall work as well?

I use a VPN when the router have a public ip (static or dynamic). Behind CGN there are not many alternatives to onion services.

Running a VPN on a cheap VPS is a much better alternative.

Ah, didn't realize you could use Tor as a poor man's TURN server. That makes sense.

... thinking about it, has anyone tried to actually use Tor to provide TURN/signalling functionality for WebRTC? Seems to me you could get true peer-to-peer WebRTC calls relatively easily this way.

Jesus, why would you waste Tor's limited bandwidth on personal cameras. Throw it behind a VPN and that's it. It's like trying to record your camera footage in blockchain bad.

Because any use of Tor's network is a good use. If you only use Tor for child porn and other communication that can get you behind bars in your jurisdiction, any Tor user is an automatic suspect. Using Tor's bandwidth for mundane things helps the whole network.

Yi cameras are quite cheap but good quality (xiaomi is behind that company I think). There is a custom firmware you can load that will enable ftp and ssh so you can grab the recordings from your home server and push them wherever you want, bypassing the need to use their cloud.

It is not just Google. Regulation on listening devices, especially those that can connect to or transmit to a network, needs a big overhaul.

Yes, I know every phone is basically the same thing and we all have those near or with us all the time, but that does not mean all our conversations and other sounds are up for grabs.

A more sane model could be requiring a deliberate manual action to turn on the the microphone for up to 10 seconds.

Something like STNG's comms badges that you touch to speak would be nice.

We are at kind of reaching climax here, it's going to get harder to collect anymore thing. With the gesture recognition SOLI chips, they managed to introduce what is technically a sexual performance monitor in the android phone near your bed, without even an ounce of resistance from the public.

Every advertiser and surveillance wet dream is now achieved.

There is no other term than total victory for the post-privacy world. It is time to surrender without conditions before they leverage their knowledge of our declining interests in our wives or of our extra-marital adventures.

(edit:There is still time to avoid blood and tears)

... if you want privacy, maybe turn off these things on your phone. Even just simply switching off the phone is easy. My phone boots in half a minute and switches off in ~5 seconds.

Home automation should have a switch off too.

Good luck turning off your home-automation controlled heating when it's 20F outside.

That's why it should have an off state. When life support stays on, and nothing else. Maybe a dumb-switch.

Also, I haven't said that privacy is not a valid concern. But if heating is so tied to your home automation, then that's a problem. It should be able to maintain a steady temperature, just as simple thermostat system, just like before buying the fancy home automation system.

(Sure, there are probably homes being built now with integrated smart/fancy systems, but still, if those lack the aforementioned fallback functionality, then they are very predictability going to have a bad time when the fancy system needs maintenance and the folks living there start to get cold.)

Pop quiz:

when sampling a a random amount of people on the street, how many would be able to turn off Google Assistant on their phone in 5 minutes?

I don't know. But if something is bothering you, find help.

I'm not saying complacency/laziness/apathy is not a serious problem in general, but most people are truly not that bothered by their privacy loss. And many do accept the risk of a potential dystopia in exchange for bells and whistles powered via crowdsourced private data.

I'm not sure why you would think that your phone is 100% off when it's "off". PCs have had an "always on" secondary processor and OS[1] for years now that runs whenever there is power, and you can't remove the battery in most phones, can you?

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Management_Engine

I'm wondering if people think this is "too paranoid" or "too obvious"?

I'm fairly confident that if it's off it's not on the network, so it cannot be turned on remotely either. (Baseband hacking and fake-off malware aside. That would be very easily detected, because batteries would die left and right.)

Sure, it's not 100.0% off, for example the battery management system is consuming some power, and maybe it's motherboard is "energized" like with ATX boards, so it can respond to switch on via keypress (which worked on PS/2, and probably there's some USB functionality that can do this too).

It's easy to say there should be a physical connect/disconnect for audio or video recording, but how do you enforce that it is designed as a complete barrier?

I'm thinking of Nevada regulations on casino equipment...

Builders have to offer warranties on new houses, including HVAC systems. Which means that the builder and their insurance company is liable when Google screws up. What insurance company would want to be in that position?

This is the correct answer. When the next recession hits and google panics and dumps all this crap overboard, the builder is left holding the bag.

Someone needs to start a home device company with open-source firmware.

Yes, susceptible to cheap Chinese clones, but if done correctly could control the market.

I think the goal should be to establish open ecosystem for those devices. That way cheap Chinese devices wouldn't be competition, but the entry-level offering to this ecosystem. Then this company would focus on higher-end devices, services and so on.

How would such an open ecosystem look like? It's the next step we would like to take. We're thinking Arduino compatibility. What do you think?

Mozilla WebThings: ZigBee over Wifi, etc. via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21297436

The market for hackable devices in every other domain (routers, phones, etc) is at most 1% of the total. Why would home automation be different?

This. X10 has been around for decades. Even the most common of devices - the home router - how many run openwrt?

Netgear, TP-Link, Linksys, D-Link and most other router vendors run 4 to 6 year old branches of OpenWRT on their products.

What exceptions to this rule exist?

Where do we have widely-used hackable devices (or tools, processes, environments, etc.)

I'd include such areas as gardening, cooking, creative activities (photography, music, etc.).

Are there any notable exceptions?

Hrm: arguably clothing and cosmetics. There are people who will spend a non-trivial amount of daily time putting on their face or wardrobe.

I don't think hackability is so much the point as open ecosystem, privacy, and interoperability. iOS wiped the floor with Symbian, and Android wiped the floor with iOS due to being more open than the predecessor. Linux is the most popular OS kernel in the world (think routers, smart devices, etc.)

I want a choice of thermostat which fits my decor, and for that to work with my smart thermometer. I'd like to buy both on eBay from a Chinese company if I'm poor, or at an upscale designer store if I'm rich.

I don't think that the devices themselves need to be hackable so much as the protocols need to be open. Any phone I buy works with any router. I think that's the kind of openness we need.

Mozilla WebThings is pretty cool. The gateway software runs on a Pi. They have their own open protocol over wifi or you can use ie. a ZigBee adapter. I've played with it and I think it has a lot of potential.

Device drivers seem to be the main issue for IoT gateways. That being said, I have been really impressed with Arcus, the open sourced Lowes IoT platform (formerly known as Iris).

ZigBee & Z-Wave work out of the box, very broad device support, writing templates for new devices is pretty straightforward.

"Iris by Lowe’s is gone, but here’s the open source code to keep your smart devices alive Lowe's closed Iris, now renamed Arcus, but released software to let these smart home products continue to work"

https://www.gearbrain.com/iris-lowes-arcus-smart-home-263347...

I didn’t know they did that. Really commendable.

Lowes also gave everyone back all the money they paid for Iris hardware, the only thibg they did not refund were monthly service subscriptions.

Best Buy just shut down their IoT offering, open sourced nothing and gave no refunds.

Loxone is a pretty nice one, planning to install it soon. Not open source, but it doesn't have to connect to Internet, your house is not polluted with radio signals, and you have full control over programming it (via their software).

Google did that! It was called Android Things. It was discontinued due to being unpopular.

But when are they/we going to learn the meta lesson, which is that this is an inevitable outcome [0] of every "cloud" connected piece of trash? With the ease of distributing software to mobile devices, there is little reason for something to be designed around phoning home instead of using well documented protocols on the local network, but for the "value add" of gradually implementing ever more surveillance and lock in.

Frankly the tech community is shirking our professional responsibility by not loudly condemning marketing-pushed junk like Nest, and letting it gain market share in the first place.

[0] Well, one of two possible outcomes really. The other being plain abandonment.

Not surprised. Google should’ve left nest out of this. Now they need everyone who has a house, a google account as well. Tony Fadell probably wouldn’t like how google transformed his product.

>>Tony Fadell probably wouldn’t like how google transformed his product.

as if Google was a paragon of integrity and privacy when Nest was sold for billions...

>Tony Fadell probably wouldn’t like how google transformed his product.

I put zero stock in the words of people who sell their company for vast sums of money, then complain how the new company runs things.

Well when they first came out I thought the product was super innovative. But the competition didn’t rest on their laurels either. I’ve looked at many smart thermostats over the last year. We settled on HomeKit because of the privacy and it not being IoT based. This knocked Nest out of the running.

>Well when they first came out I thought the product was super innovative.*

I never really understood it. It's a nice looking, albeit expensive, thermostat with some simple optimization algorithms. Now it's a spying tool.

Meanwhile, my HVAC runs on a dumb Honeywell unit that I can program a schedule on. Haven't even replaced the batteries in years.

We have Nest thermostats without a google account or any mobile app connected to them. They work fine.

This Google account stuff is only for extended automation or integration with other "smart" home stuff. I doubt many people really need or want all that, and it's mostly a gimmick anyway.

I don't know if I would exactly call the ability to monitor/adjust the set temperature in your home from in bed without having to get up and walk to the thermostat on the other side of the house a gimmick. It's also handy when you're on the couch and have a child and/or a couple cats sleeping on you that you don't want to disturb. It even functions to reduce low-level irrational anxieties when traveling [Is my house on fire right now? Okay, thermostat's still connected and temperature looks normal, I can stop worrying about that for the moment.]

I'm as wary of this continuing mass privacy invasion as anyone, but the reason it's getting traction is because it offers new functionalities people value that are decidedly not just gimmicks.

"Is my house on fire right now?" may sound paranoid, but "Has my house lost power due to the blizzard, and if so, is it getting cold enough to burst the pipes?" doesn't.

If you lost power how is it reporting anything? And how do you turn on the heat without power?

OK, if the power is out you wouldn't know the temperature. Although in theory you could build a battery powered cellular system.

But like slfnflctd said, if it doesn't report that the situation is normal, there's likely to be a problem.

If there's no power and it's cold enough to matter, you go there (or call a neighbor or handyman) to either start a generator, start up a kerosene heater, or drain the pipes.

> I don't know if I would exactly call the ability to monitor/adjust the set temperature in your home from in bed without having to get up and walk to the thermostat on the other side of the house a gimmick

Really?

How often are you changing temperature? The whole point of smart thermostats is that the temp is maintained automatically. I haven't touched mine in a long time as the schedule is set, and walking a few feet for the occasional tweak isn't really a big deal.

I think most of these gadgets cause people to fiddle with them more than they need to be because you have the option to do so.

I don't trust technology companies to mess up updating apps, removing features or breaking working functionality, sure as hell as I don't trust them with something permanently in my wall. Oh sorry, we decided to end the support for this product because there weren't any users. No, you can't use it offline. Buy a new one, break your walls every three years etc.

Maybe, maybe companies who produce industrial equipment, and know what it takes to have something work for 20 years non stop. DOS based CNC machines etc.

I've been leery of Google ever since they required me to enable web and search history to use weather and calendar alerts with Google Home.

I got rid of my Nest products and switched to a HomeKit versions because of this.

This annoyed me quite a bit as well. My Google Assistant device has a LED display that ordinarily displays the time and the temperature below it, but the temperature part was just blank without the history enabled which seems incredibly vindictive to be.

That is hostile to the user. Wow.

https://outline.com/JUHxC3

First they come for search.

Then they come for e-mail.

Then they come for mobile.

Then they come for your home.

Then no privacy is left.

Then we lose.

You forgot autonomous vehicles, which double as a high capacity sensor platform connected to the mother hive. On which you can keep piling more and more intrusive sensors in the name of safety. If you ever wondered why Google of all companies is in the forefront of that technology.

I bought a nest thermostat just before google bought it. Returned it immediately because even before the current “smart home” insanity I knew google couldn’t be trusted to not harvest and steal information about you.

I’m ditching Nest when my contract is up. They’re forcing everyone to convert to Google accounts. I guess I’ll replace them with Ring cams? Doesn’t seem like there are many other good cheap alternatives with a data storage plan.

I also have a 4G Arlo security camera and wish there were more 4G/5G remote camera options.... hoping we’re about to get more options as 5G spreads.

Ring means you use an Amazon owned account.

I’m aware, but I firmly see Google as worse company and steward of my personal data than Amazon.

I’ve been using a couple of Logitech Circle 2 and have been pretty happy with them. The software comes with data storage plans and integrates with all the major home ecosystems (Amazon, Apple, Google).

Thanks, I'll do some research on those. Appreciate the tip.

It really is a pox of a product. I’m in the process of buying a house and any listings with Nest products I just skip. I know it is negligible, financially and physically, to remove them, but why even bother when there are plenty of options that don’t come pre-equipped with dysfunctional spyware.

What happens with Nest if your Google account gets locked out for any reason? You can no longer heat your home?

If you can get a pay as you go Sim card it may be worth it to register a new Google account just for nest.

Separate nest from your personal Google account. That's if nest is worth that effort.

They absolutely will know it’s you straight away... their algorithms will instantly match the address with the location data they slurp from your phone, if nothing else.

Sharing an address isn't uncommon. I don't think there's a big risk that a Google account would be locked because another account at the same address had been.

This is not a confidence inspiring answer.

It is not worth the risk.

They ban other accounts based on IP, so this would not be a stretch.

Because not more than one person can live in a house?

> I’m in the process of buying a house and any listings with Nest products I just skip.

That is incredibly foolish. You're cutting off your nose to spite your face. A thermostat can be replaced for under $100.

Instead you choose to miss out on options that might be desirable. You're not teaching anyone a lesson here.

This sounds exactly like something RMS would say.

Be pragmatic.

But he's no idea how deeply integrated it is?

It's a thermostat! They don't sink tentacles into the walls to leave behind invisible internet-enabled slime. You can replace a thermostat.

I think I acknowledged the ease of removal, but in the market I am in - moving back home to Portland, Ore. - most of the homes that have Nest products have multiple Nest thermostats, Nest locks, and Nest smoke detectors. As the article alludes to, it is a product line that contractors were going all-in on for quite a while. There are an abundance of wonderful homes that do not have these gadgets, so using one data point to limit my search can be helpful. I am looking at a lot of homes while working full-time in a different city. Sure, I may miss the perfect house, but I doubt it.

I don’t know why this is being downvoted so much, but the comment is correct if slightly badly worded. Looking for property that will be off-putting to other potential buyers is usually the way to get a good deal as long as you sweat over the big details (Mold/damp, subsidency, problems with location, etc...)

Even replacing a heating systems at a cost of $10,000 could be offset by getting a good deal on a property.

Fitting user name. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON.

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