Google to buy 6.6% stake in ADT in home security push
reuters.com
reuters.com
If someone wants into your house, they will get into your house. There's giant glass windows in most homes these days and door locks are hardly much more than a speed bump.
All you should look at ADT for is simply making you not the easiest house to get into. But if someone wants into your house, a security system is unlikely to be something that stops them.
Edit: to be more clear, I think the deterrent part is the equivalent of putting an ADT sign in a window or nearby. THAT is the deterrent, not the system itself.
About five days after we bought our home the ADT salesman came to the door and after seeing that we were on the fence used this as another argument. Like you, I really only wanted it for the fire detection, and the fact that the panel has an emergency button and is located in the back but with clear line of sight to the front door.
We did have one break in during the 8 years we lived there, but the German Shepard was what stopped them, not the alarm sign in the yard.
At the end of the day... it will deter those that aren't interested in dealing with it. And for those that aren't deterred it just gives them the info they need to know it's a smash, grab and run situation.
Is ADT saying it prevents people from being able to break in?
Home security is about alerting police, in case someone does break in, so they don't have time to get many valuables.
Newer systems include video, to help convict them.
It's not about "you can't get it", it's about "you're more likely to get caught, so don't even try it."
I don't think someone is more likely to get caught, do you have any sort of documentation to indicate that? I suspect crimes of opportunity might be more likely to be caught I guess, but not someone with any foresight.
If a thief goes in under the impression the house has a security system, it would be easy enough to prevent recognition. Oversized jacket, hat, some sort of mask. All of it nondescript/black, no logos, etc. Apply a little bit of thought to this and it's easy.
In my area, cops aren't likely to show up immediately anyway. Someone would have minutes, not seconds, to get in and out. Maybe in an area with private security or with a larger police force.
That all said though, I think people's fear of crime is much larger than reality. As I said, I think the only value I'd personally find in a system like this is the fire alerts and an emergency button to hit if necessary.
I've had to deal with a few break-ins and every police officer I've talked to about it said that most burglars are in and out in a few minutes. They've mentioned that physical deterrents are helpful (ie. bars on windows) but not once have they said that an alarm system would help matters.
You might want to be sitting down when I tell you how much your grandmothers Jewelry is worth.
ADT used to have a clause in their contracts you could only cancel during a narrow window near renewal, is that still an issue? They are pretty costly per month compared to some other providers, this even if you own your equipment
I know 100% if someone wants into a house, they will get into the house. I know that when people put 'this property protected by Smith & Wesson' signs on their house, it only informs burglars there are guns to be stolen. I always joked I don't want ADT, just the sign.
But now that I actually have an alarm system, it's great. If I leave for the weekend, I know nobody has broken in. It won't stop them, but I at least know.
They also said that saying that you have guns definitely increases the attractiveness to burglars. Guns are one of the things that would be easily (not legally) sold to somebody or kept to use in another crime. It wouldn't take long to figure out how many people live in a house and if all of them were gone.
Not sure it's any better than an ADT sign, but maybe just as good.
I mostly needed it because for whatever weird ass reason my living room doesn't have lights despite being built in 1994. The lamp I use is fine, but the wall switch for the outlet it's plugged into is by the front entry door, I come in the side entrance where the garage is. So I've rigged it up so that I can turn the lamp on from the garage entry, thus allowing me to just turn on the one light I need anyway if it's dark.
So when I'm away I have it set to turn the lamp on near the time the sun sets, then turn off around my usual bed time. HomeKit is nice and lets me easily turn these automations on or off. Usually during the winter it gets dark anyway so I have another automation that turns the lamp on when I pull into the driveway.
I think that particular outlet is from iDevices and cost something like $40. Worth it imo.
The relevant advice here was "I'm not telling you to do this, but you can buy home alarm system stickers on eBay and thieves literally cannot know whether you actually have the system installed or not."
I had a similar experience when considering a water filter. In that situation, I was able to actually figure out a sensible path, thanks to a very few unbiased websites: test your water or read your locality's water reports to figure out what your drinking water contaminants actually are, then figure out specifically which filter (if any) will address those specific contaminants. Meanwhile, plenty of people will buy a mass-market water filter for "peace of mind" which may actually be neither necessary nor sufficient.
I would NOT look at it as lowering insurance.
We added (real!) cameras after this and for the next 2 years freaked out every time an alert hit our phones. Now there are so many false positives that it's conditioned us to be less uptight.
My sister has a monitored alarm where I'm a secondary contact. On a recent alarm they phoned my to ask if I wanted them to call the cops. As I'm (at least) second in line this had to take at least 15 minutes since the alarm, plus the police response time (tip: minor property crime is not a priority for police). The burglars were long gone by the time anyone got there.
So my point is it's largely security theatre, like airport security. It makes you feel better I guess but does nothing.
It's difficult to improve on as well.. good physical security is directly at odds with accessibility and livability.
> It makes you feel better I guess but does nothing.
Worse than that.. as you've noted, it's reconditioned your expectations and it belies the fact that you can never truly secure anything in your home.
If you truly have something valuable, you can either insure it and hope for the best, or store it somewhere other than a space optimized for sleeping, eating and bathing.
If the cost of the security system is less than the discount you get on your insurance policy, then it may be worthwhile purely for that, but it's highly unlikely that the technology will be used to capture the thief let alone recover your property. There is much better and less intrusive technology for that purpose anyways.
Home security seems on the same footing with home anti virus.
I would also like to know if someone broke in my home if I am not there.
Yes, I am well aware of the statistics about gun ownership in the home, suicides, accidental shootings, etc.
Releasing sensor data at all seems like a pretty big flaw, though. Lack of window sensors and number or existence of motion detectors seems like a dataset you wouldn't want getting out without some sort of ID verification (or at all).
Would be an interesting experiment to start calling about random addresses.
I doubt they’re actually that cynical though.
I bailed out of that real fast and ordered the Google Nest system instead.
But don’t discount the value in monitoring something that you can’t fully control. By the time someone greats into my house they’ll be long gone with anything of value when the police arrive (if they ever do), but having something alert me and the local Fire Department in case of smoke is useful. Same with leak detection and flooded basements, or break-ins. These are things I’d much rather know when they happen so that I can remediate, gather pets that may be wandering the neighborhood after door kicked in, etc during the day than after getting home from a long day at work (not issue in Covid-19 times). Even worse to come home to find a problem when getting back from business trip or family vacation.
ADT is probably not going to get Google's data. They are limited in what they know about their customers. How much data does ADT have in comparison to Google?
Google OTOH is going to get access to about 6.5 million ADT customers. Needless to say, Google already has acquired a lot of data on a lot of people, including those ADT customers.
If what ADT knows is now known by Google, then it is not just the details of a security system that might be disclosed by one entity, but the details of the people inside the building.
The risk (i.e., the potential damage) of undesired disclosure is greater when one entity has access to "all" data versus when the data is spread amongst multiple entities.
I wonder what this says for the Google/Nest Security product future. The existing Nest Secure[0] is a well designed product, but also rather limiting (only one base unit, which is frustrating for houses with multiple entrances, or large houses). The Nest Secure was released ~3 years ago, and there have been some minor feature improvements, but no hardware additions or changes.
[0] https://store.google.com/us/product/nest_secure_alarm_system
Secure was pretty easy to setup, so would be unfortunate if they cancelled and seeded DIY to Ring.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11832828
[2]: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/nest-camera-hacked-hacker-spoke...
I honestly like bradfitz's youtube video the best to show the Nest Protect (the smoke alarm) issues[0]. They have since fixed these issues, as this was the gen one protect.
For your #2 (no insider knowledge), that looks like people's accounts getting hacked and then the hackers talking through them. All home camera cloud based cameras have had these cases. I think Nest moving to Google account login system for Nest is probably the best protection against this kind of thing happening. Account takeovers happen, and guarding against them at scale is hard (especially when people reuse passwords).
For #1, I think the culture has changed a lot as it's been absorbed into Google's hardware division. Hopefully it's better, but I couldn't say anything of value there.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BpsMkLaEiOY (warning, loud video)
The second thing was seeing Google continue to somehow justify Nest Cameras’ lack of local storage as somehow being a good thing (check the mod posts on the Nest support forums - it’s laughable). That’s idiocy. My house’s coax cable conduit is exposed where it enters the house - it’s trivial to sneak-around the perimeter and snip the coax with a pair of kitchen scissors and then all of my Nest cameras are useless. Why can’t they be configured to save to my LAN’s NAS as a failover?
It sucks for me that the decision to shut down external access to the Nest API was made literally days after I dropped over $1500 on Nest kit - but since then I haven’t bought any more - I’ll be transitioning over to other brands that respect me as a consumer, instead of locking me in to their ecosystem of products designed around the demonstrably false assumption that a home’s internet connection is 100% available.
For example, many times on the Nest app I'll try to deactivate the alarm (when coming back home) but it'll give an error saying that it couldn't connect to the alarm, try again later. Yet as soon as I open the door, magically the app knows the door is open and the alarm will sound in n seconds, so clearly there's connectivity of some kind.
Furthermore, it seems that some of the requests to change the state of the alarm (disabled, armed) seem to get queued somehow, since sometimes it'll give an error when disabling the alarm through the app, then I'll go in, disable the alarm, reenable it, and a few minutes later it'll disable it as if the app message got processed later. That's pretty much the worst case scenario; not only does it not respond immediately, but it also leaves the system in a state that's not intended by the user.
It's maddening enough that I'm not buying any more Nest products. They're well designed, but it seems that nobody cares about the software past the out of box experience.
Some buggieness.
The single base unit worked well enough for me when I had a 3-entrance house.
As well, there is the siren problem. The siren is not loud enough to be heard in all corners of my house well. I'd like to be able to have a siren in my bedroom so if it does go off in the middle of the night, it would be very clear to me.
If so, Google paid a shockingly low percentage to exclude their major competitors.
(Arguably, these discounts are things they trust you at your word for, but perhaps if they're not satisfied they're true during a claim, they might use it as a reason to not pay out.)
Also, the discount is for central monitoring, not merely having a system.
I'd reread your paperwork if I were you. It sounds like you could have falsified information, and effectively have no insurance.
Except the time it took you to research, install, validate it's running, and do general upkeep. Also doesn't help you if you're on vacation with limited internet service.
Yes you can set this up yourself (and spend a lot more on the hardware, which they generally give to you pretty cheaply or even "free" because you're signing a contract) but when you go hiking in the mountains and someone uses your Facebook posts as a cue that you're out of town, you're SOL.
Don't get me wrong I love looking at all the home security stuff you can do, and it does indeed sound like a neat project. But you're really paying these companies for monitoring and automatic (human) response, not the security systems themselves.
So true, my dad has a monitoring system he built and he constantly looks at his phone as a deer or bear or something triggers it. I'd imagine the lost productivity for people who depend on the flow for work would be immense.
In an area without Internet service, for me, it is common to miss calls as well. Plus, from personal experience, the security company will not notify law enforcement until they have called you to confirm it is not a false-positive alarm.
In my case, before the alarm goes off due to a forced entry, I will have automatically received notifications with snapshots of people around my property. Even if the security company had called immediately, a response would take >10 minutes. So I just self-monitor.
Overall, with home security you basically just want to be a more annoying, harder target than your closest neighbors. It's sad but true.
Call yourself BEU Security.
Alarm.com has built some of their own hardware, but their operation is obviously much smaller than Nest. Can they still compete?
Why exactly do you think some other home security company would not also use your data? Except they will secure it poorly with a default password.
Belief that Google's business model is incompatible with security/privacy.
Unfair criticism that Google will just shut down any service/offering once they get bored --- it doesn't happen to pay services.
The claim that ADT or another large, established home security company is less capable of securing your data than Google requires evidence.
I don't want a company that makes its money selling information to advertisers to have such full access to my life.
That's terrible reasoning. Even if literally every company is doing it, we can still be upset that Google is doing it. Google has gone out of their way to collect broad amounts of my data in a way that ADT and other companies haven't - from an ongoing list of where I am and where I shop to what I search for on Chrome.
You can argue about fair split of added value between company and user, but it’s not like users get nothing.
With nest cameras for example, what I personally get is really good AI to recognize people. I’m ok with that value exchange.
Not in my experience. I tried really hard for a while to "buy in" to the Google ecosystem a few years ago. But the data accuracy was too low, the Google Location Services WiFi triangulation actually made navigation significantly less accurate, the Nest thermostat kept learning stupid patterns where it would turn my A/C down to 68 for like 10 minutes, then up to 82, just because of a couple of days with odd weather, they use dark patterns to trick you into enabling data collection features, Play Music makes it really hard to, you know, play my music, and they still keep discontinuing, breaking, or hiding features in apps like Maps. Last time I was going somewhere it took me ten minutes to figure out where they'd moved Offline Maps.
My guess they want to get into the 'home automation' bits. Which is a huge money sink and really not that interesting. They also need to be willing to do something more than on a 2-3 year time frame. I have things in my house that are 25+ years old. I zero plans on replacing them. My parents have a house that is 80 years old. They also have zero plans on replacing things. For the embedded market which is where ADT sits they need to be thinking 10-15 year time frames. They also need to think in the 'fail usable' state. If my internet goes out and I can not get my garage door open I am not happy and that thing will be on the way to the garbage bin. They also probably want in on that monthly recurring lease on equipment you do not really own.
I don't feel like that data is easily monetizable to a company like ADT, but is likely very monetizable to Google.
HN commentators often have a naive idea that more data is always better.
There is a second possibility here. That no one is exploring. That Google is just investing money. Which means they have no effective way to use their existing capital. MS ended up at this position at one point.
So in your world, Google being able to sell target ads is more dangerous to you, then hackers getting access to your security cams or baby monitors, or stealing your personal dox and reselling them on darknet markets for bitcoin?
There are millions of people who have been harmed by identity theft from databases going around of people's personal info that have been hacked from less secure companies.
There was have been cheap IP cams that have had backdoors that were exploited, unbelievably, to build a search engine for readily available for pedophiles (https://ipvm.com/reports/the-search-engine-for-hacking-ip-ca...)
You have millions of people scammed by Indian call center scammers by taking advantage of terrible Windows security.
You have tons of scammers buying people's personal financial information from existing databases that are traded.
These are all real, palpable harm, where people have gone bankrupt, spent years cleaning up identity theft, had their children's room monitored by pedophiles and pranksters, etc
You know where all of those scams come from? Targeted Google Ads... So yeah, Google being able to sell and target ads is extremely dangerous, especially when they enable ads to be targeted at vulnerable populations like senior citizens.
Funny story, the attack chain here starts with Google Ads, usually to push a Google Chrome extension in the Chrome Web Store, and then people end up letting a scammer onto their PC. And yet "terrible Windows security" is what you are worried about?
I have been asking Google and Googlers alike to address these concerns for years, and Google's movement on it is far too slow, because the systems they use are far too profitable to change.
No, quite a number of them are done via SMS and VoiceMail spam, e.g. Robocalls. What, you've never gotten a text or voicemail threatening you with a federal bench warrant unless you call up and pay money?
Here are screenshots of malware showing on the top search I see seniors search for, tested just now: https://imgur.com/a/rIAMjpM
Google sells scammers the ability to squat the trademark of a competitor, MapQuest (very likely illegal in it's own right, no ads are served on a search for "google maps"), which is commonly searched by senior citizens. The ad is barely perceptible from a real, organic result, and claims to be MapQuest. And the result is a page that only functions when you install a malicious web browser on your PC.
What's incredible here, is that you'll blame Microsoft for your company's ad platform, make MapQuest look bad (because you served a fake MapQuest site to people looking for it), and promote Google Maps and Chromebooks as an alternative... all while raking in the cash from the scam ads. Google is a business that operates on the revenue from scams. Every supposedly good thing Google does, and every paycheck it issues, is coming from ripped off individuals. The entire product cycle and marketing direction reinforces this.
This search term has seen nothing but malware and scams since at least 2013. If Google had any interest in protecting consumers (or not violating antitrust and, honestly, trademark laws), Google would not serve ads on this search term, ever. Feel free to investigate this internally, I am confident nothing will change.
I highly doubt these scams make up a significant fraction of Google's revenue. It is much more likely these are simply the failures of false negatives in automation falling through the cracks.
Besides the ad target scams, the Web itself is full of these scam malware sites. If you search for things to download, organic search results often send you links which eventually terminate in malware, especially true of searches for porn, software/music/movies.
I will raise this MapsQuest scam internally, so thanks for the report (note, I have nothing to do with ads, I work in research thats not ads related)
That service is the call screening. Where you can (I'm not sure if it's standard on all Android phones, but I have a Pixel 3) have your virtual assistant talk to an unknown caller and transcribe whatever they say (but they always hang up).
It just made me momentarily feel so much better about Google, the sense that this one little thing actually improves my life by leveraging the dystopian tech infrastructure. I don't hate the bots that much, I hate them not working for me.
I just thought I'd share this because you must be bombarded with anti-Google stuff these days.
The problem is, you have become part of the problem. Because the bot working for you is now annoying other people. Surely, you realize the companies that employ annoying bots all hate dealing with them themselves, but it improves their lives to subject you to them.
I don't think so, because to me the annoyance experienced by people who make unsolicited calls to me isn't important. It's not part of "the problem" from my perspective.
They are presumably being compensated.
Their diversification is dubious, hence the push back.
[1] - https://twitter.com/zerohedge/status/1290338641919856640
I clicked on your link. I'm also not sure what "SELL $5.75 BILLION OF ESG BONDS IN CORPORATE RECORD" means?
More detail on Alphabet's bond sale: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/on-small-business/al...
- Number one, have a TV on. If they see a TV on they assume people are home and watching.
- Get a big dog. If they have to choose between a house with a dog and one without, they'll chose the one without.
- Get motion activated security lights. Always-on lights just provide extra light for breaking in, the motion sensors draw attention (although most robberies happen during the day so it's sort of a moot point).
Call it "Release the Hounds".
Humans will always be humans, and humans LOVE to tell you how they've beat the system.
Now if you have a Picasso or $5 million in diamonds at home, they will find a way to enter, but for a iPhone they'll go to your neighbor that doesn't have a TV on, or motion sensor lights.
I wasn't aware of this. I wonder if this means robberies have gone down as a result of more people forced to stay home due to Covid.
Briefly speaking, it is to be expected product integration (starting with Google Cloud for ADT video) and in the future some 'automation' and newer products.
By the way, can there be any 'synergies' between ADT and Fitbit?
[1] https://s22.q4cdn.com/631128414/files/doc_presentations/2020...
[2] https://investor.adt.com/events-and-presentations/events-cal...
At the same time, I would have a hard time naming a company that I’d trust less to integrate into my home security than Google.
Privacy, (lack of) customer service, service continuity...I know these aren’t issues that would worry most consumers but they would all be on my mind.
It it even possible to roll your own LAN solution any more? The tech giants have become so hostile to anyone who dares to try to control their own data that I never even hear it discussed any more.
I was amazed that not a single product in the sub $100 range on Amazon seemed to support direct LAN access. I ended up going with the Wyze cam, which still has that issue, but I'd trust a bit more over the no-name Chinese brands still running 10 year old Linux kernels on their cameras.
From my experience, many cameras won't publicize/document this information, but it's still available/possible for almost every one.
I suggest this over an IP camera as you might as well be paranoid about those too. If you need live streaming that can be done with open source software fairly easily.
You would have to spend some time working on hardware, and it'd probably cost more, but technically it's just tedious rather than difficult. There are some projects to do this with the Pi camera already. You could even add object detection with ML quite easily, which is something you pay a lot for with other platforms.
What you miss out on is the level of embedded and mechanical integration that the commercial stuff has. Blink has a two year battery life (replaceable), the housings are IP rated etc.
It’s entirely possible to do what you want.
Google have a reputation (rightly or wrongly) for dropping support for products quickly if they don't want them any more.
In the home security perspective installs can last decades, and changing suppliers can be expensive. that's not a good match for Google's approach.
It's Google, so they'll probably force you to create a YouTube account to watch videos recorded by your security system, put adverts for private security services over the top, share what time you're usually out of the house with third parties, and then shut down the service after a couple of years.
Google has never made a product that did not collect data in a unique manner from its other products. Between that, the dark patterns, and this recent experience, google the company and the people that work there just give me the creeps.
From previous comment: "I uploaded a picture to google maps as part of a review. About a month later I get an actual notification on my phone - hey do you want to share this picture you took in City Park last weekend? It creeped me out beyond belief. Google had been rifling through my personal pictures in the background while I was going about my life. It was an enormous breach of my personal space and it is just one example of many related to google."
Additionally, I very much want an internet connected smoke alarm. But I would want something from a trustworthy company. And currently google does not fit that profile.
But I don't understand why people intentionally give their photos to a system for processing, apparently happily let it be used for advertising and government surveillance, but then get upset when it's used for features. You're rely happier with everyone spying on you and pretending they aren't?
It was a surprise for me since I forgot I left access to my photos on. iOS 14 resolves this by letting you choose which photos you allow an application to have access to. This cannot come any sooner because that was disturbing.
edit: I shared the original photo because I believe in helping other people.
Google then took liberties with that permission to an extreme. And it was personally revolting to me. I cannot overstate my absolute disgust with what happened there.
Don't do business with Amazon.
There is a article in German there. Linked the reddit post, since it is in English.
Facebook would be worse. Imagine opening your door and having it “helpfully” post an update that you’re back home.
Apparently this was surprisingly difficult to remedy.
Imagine if your house won't let you in because it doesn't think you have gone out!
how does that work? can't he tailgate someone on the way out? or get the guy at the security desk to let him through? was he the last one out of the plant or something?
The garage had a gate that would usually require a card, but if you worked a late shift, then you might get off work just after a concert or other event let out and the gate was left up for everyone to leave. Which meant the next day, it would still think you were in the garage and not want to let you in.
Oh, but you should have known before to click through 63 pages of options to disable these notifications to strangers.
So sorry. We can do better™.
Requirements are 1 in each bedroom and 1 in the hallway outside each bedroom. That adds up quickly.
Where I live, that's the minimum required by law, networked device or not. So it's not surprising that Nest requires it.
But you're right — that does add up quickly when converting from technology that's worked for 130 years to the SV "disruptor" version.
When a smoke detector goes off, I've got my system set to: 1) Turn off HVAC/heat 2) Unlock exterior doors 3) Turn on lights 4) Flush syncs of any local data to remote sources
What's the google price tag for again? Initially it was worthwhile for the panicky waving motion to cancel alarms. But then they removed that.
For home security you need to have customer trust to succeed. Google? No way. Facebook? Yeah right.
Which 'secret groups' are you referring to?
GSuite is also fairly well supported.
I can't think of a faster or more effective way for Google to destroy the public's trust in it than to inflict its customer service practices on the masses.
Definitely Facebook. But I still wouldn't trust Google.
So an example of this is that I have water monitors and a water main shutoff valve that works with Smart Things. But Smart Things doesn't have an alarm, and Ring doesn't support the water monitor and shutoff valve..
Not sure I'm happy with ADT, since they are expensive (per month monitoring). But they do have name brand recognition.
So far Amazon seems like its treating its acquisitions better as far as customers are concerned. Ecobee does make a model with Alexa built-in but I got an older one that doesn't have that.
I am really tempted to buy some Eufy 2K cameras, which I hear are decent quality and integrate with Homekit. Apple has tougher security requirements than Google or Amazon and the products that meet it seem better, even if more expensive.
In Japan there is a company called Secom. This company has a near monopoly on security systems. They have this monopoly because instead of just calling the cops they have staff on patrol who respond to alarms. You can imagine the install base moat required to have active personal patroling constantly.
The end result is alarms get checked. Every time we mis-unlocked our office a Secom person would stop by soon after to check. No idle phone calls from a phone center, the staff checked the premise themselves.
Of course similar services must exist in the states for businesses, but without the install base they cannot be priced reasonable for home use. Secom is used everywhere, from uppper class homes to museums.
[1] https://blog.google/products/google-nest/partnership-adt-sma...
That being said, while I disagree with their business practices, I think their information security is one of the best. For contrast, imagine Equifax running your home security... :)
For example are you worried that a real human at your home security company will be invading your privacy? When they do are you worried that real human will take personal action against you? Or are you worried about automated systems building knowledge about your life based on home security data? Or are you worried about your home security data used in aggregate? Maybe you are worried about attackers getting access?
Internal infosec and privacy controls/policies are required to protect you from some of these. Some of these threats may be more likely from Google, but I'd say some of them are more likely from other home security providers (keep in mind that a lot of home security products are actually intended to have another human monitoring your home).
> Or are you worried about automated systems building knowledge about your life based on home security data? Or are you worried about your home security data used in aggregate?
4 years is nothing in the consumer market with the exception of maybe smartphones.
Nobody has the money to buy all electronics new every 4 years and looking at the current Android version distribution, a lot of consumers don't even buy new smartphones every 4 years.
Smartphones that expire rapidly is a Google innovation.
Home appliance lifetime is typically measured in decades.
Home Furnace is probably the longest lasting Home Appliance and it has an expected life of 15-20 years. Common Kitchen Appliances (and most other appliances) are about 10 years...
Measuring support spans this way is... odd. It's like saying "ubuntu only comes with 1 year of support" because you installed 16.04 today. If we're going by this metric a lot of electronics have 0 years of support. Regardless, apple is still has the longest support, at least when it comes to phones/tablets.
Ubuntu 16.04 may only have one year of support left, but my current desktop hardware supports both 16.04 and 20.04. It's much more reasonable to sunset old software to reduce maintenance burden while providing an upgrade path than to lock people out of any upgrade path for their hardware.
There is also the distinction that Apple sells closed hardware and prevents you from installing a custom OS with longer software support. And that Apple products cost $$ while Ubuntu is free, which leads to different reasonable expectations. But I don't think either of those are needed to make my point.
Isn't hardware support just called "warranty"? That remains the same regardless of when you bought it.
>And that Apple products cost $$ while Ubuntu is free, which leads to different reasonable expectations.
My point wasn't whether canonical/apple's support lifecycle policies were reasonable, just that that defining support periods as the last day it was sold, rather the first day it was sold was unusual/misleading. If you want something to be supported a long time after you get it, you don't grab the oldest version, simple as that. Consumer products don't have a support subscription like enterprise products do, so limiting support to old products is really the only economically viable choice that companies have.
For that reason I think it's more than fine to continue selling it discounted until 2018, it's not like they were marketing it as flagship.
Additionally the 6s from Sept 2015 is receiving iOS 14.
Not that Apple's being altruistic here, obviously they want to segment the market and get money from wherever they can. But, can't expect them to sell low price point devices that are as future-proofed (future-resisted?) as top end hardware.
samsung: 1 year https://www.bestbuy.com/site/samsung-22-6-cu-ft-french-door-...
whirlpool: 1 year https://www.bestbuy.com/site/whirlpool-25-2-cu-ft-french-doo...
lg: 1 Year General, 5 Years Sealed System, 5 Years Compressor, 6-10 Years Linear Compressor. https://www.bestbuy.com/site/lg-23-5-cu-ft-french-door-count...
bosch: 1 year https://www.bestbuy.com/site/bosch-800-series-20-5-cu-ft-4-d...
kitchenaid: 1 year labor, 10 year parts https://www.bestbuy.com/site/kitchenaid-25-8-cu-ft-5-door-fr...
>I thought the compressor was the thing that was not warranted because they break so frequently.
given the sample above, it seems like at least with LG, that they have a lot of confidence in their compressors and "sealed system" (probably the refrigerant system).
Do you buy all new devices when you buy a new WiFi router? I don’t.
Previously I did buy a few new devices to get 5GHz support from an ac router, after I moved to a location that had very poor 2.4Ghz connectivity. It can happen but it’s rare, I’d say?
And even a 10+ year old b/g router can handle 4k streaming.
For consumers that just watch Netflix (even at 4k), latency is irrelevant and you just need the bandwidth to be high enough; for these usecases, sure, a 10-year old router is fine. This is the consumer that keeps their Android phone for 2-3 years until it breaks, and only then upgrades.
I don't think the GP was claiming that everyone needs to upgrade frequently, just that for some consumers it makes sense.
Both segments can coexist, and so it's valid for different products/companies to tailor their offerings to one or both. It's pretty clear that you shouldn't buy Google products if you want to set-and-forget for 10 years. But if you're going to upgrade to the newest revision of smart-home gadget in less than 5 years anyway, then Google's product-ADD isn't a particularly relevant negative to you.
Definitely a factor to make sure that consumers are aware of when purchasing though!
I've been on a reliable average 7ms and peak 9ms latency for twelve years. It's not necessary to replace your router hardware to get low latencies.
I agree you shouldn’t rip out 5e cables to install 6e if what you have works for you and there aren’t any substantial improvements.
To that end, I’ve personally skipped Wi-Fi 6 and will wait for 6E before considering an upgrade. Even then, I’d like to have at minimum 3 devices that support Wi-Fi 6 before I upgrade. I’ve two such devices right now, so it’s not out of the question for me.
I’m in favour of keeping devices automatically updated even years later, but I suspect the only economical way of doing so is emulating devices in VMs, a giant test suite and automatic security update testing (no humans required beyond reviewing code diffs). But setting up that kind of automated testing infrastructure is a high bar for most companies, so it’s cheaper to put the cost on the consumer to consume again within 3-5 years for the next product update lifecycle...
I get this question every time when someone sees my latency, yes it is on WiFi. I don't use cabled and haven't for at least 6-7 years. My latency was always low except when I broke something in my local networking stack.
There are at this point 40+ other visible access points in my vicinity, and my router is two rooms away. My walls are made of concrete or brick.
Everyone should stop thinking WiFi is slow, because it just isn't.
Sure, if you're wired, there's no benefit to upgrading your router.
And then there was that day Google accidently deleted everyone's router configuration.
It worked great as a dumb access point. Everything else was shambles.
Just to let you know, data is not resold by Google. It's used for interest-based advertising.
1. google sends you a bid request, which contains the user's demographic/interest information
2. you respond to it with a bid, which has a unique tracking id
3. if your bid wins, your ad gets served. from there, you can serve a javascript payload that fingerprints the user. at this point you can create a huge database mapping of device fingerprint and ip (probably unique, but also pseudonymous) to interest/demographic data.
4. (optional) you can correlate the data you've gotten with third party databases to augment the data you already have. I'm not sure how viable this is. You can get more demographic information, but deanonymizing the pseudonymous identifiers from step 3 might be difficult to impossible.
All of this only really works if you can fingerprint the user, which might be against the ToS of most ad exchanges. They're probably also on the lookout for this type of thing, because you can imagine this is pretty important business data. However, if you're big enough, you might be able to convince the ad networks to let you fingerprint for "fraud prevention" purposes.
A few months or a year later, I get emails from groups like "stop republicans" or from local campaigns in states I don't care about to elizabethwarren@[mydomain.com]. And I only have used that email once to donate to Elizabeth. And it's not just one politician, it's all of them. Even ones we feel are so idealistic, like my Andrew Yang donation that I did based on his Reddit plea now receives emails targeted to my demographic about how it's my fault the democrats will fail to stop Trump, or lose California, or whatever.
Financial companies also sell my data. I get phishing emails to turbotax2014@[mydomain.com] which is what I used to file that year's taxes. [Edit: in retrospect, this one is probably just a hack or incompetence rather than intentional selling]
And which emails have never been sold or given out? The ones I use for Google or Facebook. Never in the past 15 years.
The same applies to volunteering. I made the mistake of giving my real phone number to a congressional campaign that I signed up to volunteer with. Since then I've gotten dozens of spam texts from many different organizations.
Does google ever actually resell data? Or just monetize it? There’s a big difference selling the personal information on someone versus letting people buy targeted ads.
I assume the Brinks deal will be phased out and ADT will replace it? Given what people are saying about ADT's pricing, hopefully their offer will be no more expensive than Brinks'.
I believe that if ADT wants to stay competitive, they would hugely benefit from a swath of integrations with different vendors doing different things to allow for a modular home security experience.
I'm not sure that partnering with Google really accomplishes that... at least not on its own.
personally I would be more worried about ADT getting google data. plus ADT has tie-ins with many police depts. this could go south really fast from here. Also, google already has fitbit data so google is slowly spreading its tentacles into our life in real world much more so than FB.
honestly I feel like I need to minimize my google usage right-bloody-now. a slightly better web search is not worth all that shit it comes with.
I wonder if any of Google's large "diversification" pushes have yielded success?
Edit I wonder what modern solutions exist in this space for takeover of old systems. It feels like every alarm system installed is designed to extract your money for components for 3 years or so and then immediately become "discontinued." Most of the companies I see want me to buy a new system and lock into 3 years of monitoring. It wouldn't be so bad if the components weren't so damned expensive. $1k to fit out a small house, no smarthome nonsense even.
- [1] https://www.home-assistant.io/ - [2] https://konnected.io/
That is why Comcast pushed hard into home security. Is there a significant value to home security companies, or is the whole industry a scam?
There are a couple small companies that provide more access to your own hardware. You can use their centralized system to send yourself alerts etc. Having police/fire/medical dispatch gets back them paying ADT to process those alerts. If you want to start in this direction I was happy with suretyhome.com.
Edit: regarding consumer hardware its all either zigbee or z-wave these days. A DIY system (like with surety) is generally all compatible and Id ball park more like $3-400 for hardware. If you use one of the bigger players they use custom firmware & lock down the panel/sensor management to ensure you pay them a nice markup.
Ring Alarm does offer a "wired alarm takeover kit" apparently: https://shop.ring.com/products/retrofit-alarm-kit
However, my alarm was added well after the house was built, and they used wireless sensors so they wouldn't have to open up any walls. These all use a proprietary protocol, which probably could be reverse engineered by someone smarter than me, but no drop in solutions exist. I am in the process of replacing all of them with Z-wave sensors to use with home-assistant, but removing them means re-painting all of the window trim.
Google is a data mining company. Nothing more, noting less. We are the product. You are stupid to allow them into your home.