Some Texans shocked to find their smart thermostats were turned up remotely

Copying my comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27566784

> Turns out, some of them just didn’t read the fine print. That...was the entire point of the Smart Savers Texas. I suppose they'd say the "fine print" of a mortgage being that you have to pay it back.

> “They’d been asleep long enough that the house had already gotten to 78 degrees,” English said. “So they woke up sweating.”

For my entire childhood, that's my parents' thermostat in Florida: 78F.

The whole article basically is made up from quotes of a single person and just slightly mentions some contract-related stuff without even quoting text from the said contract.

This is absolutely not a quality article.

Here in Ontario, we used to get ads for these from the power company regularly - at least here, they can modify your thermostat “by a few degrees” at peak load time, and you get a rebate on your bill.

(I don’t have one, and I’ve never really thought about it before, but I suppose you could get one, hook it up to 12V power but not to your air conditioner, then get the rebate on your bill and make the electricity company think they’re controlling your thermostat, when really they’re not doing anything… But you’d still need to let their IoT device on your network, and I assume it’s rubbish.)

My previous power company in FL kept bugging me about installing similar "features"... and offering a small rebate on my bill for the trouble.

Breaking and entering? Invasion of privacy? 4th amendment? I'm sure its covered in the EULA when they signed up.

previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27557463