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Comment by qqqwerty | Hacker News Reader

> Maybe I'm too paranoid. Thoughts?

Yes. They aren't using these features to serve you ads. They aren't using them to lock you in to their platform. They added these features because the vast majority of users are not particularly technical and they want some dashboard they can login to to see some cute metrics about their system. They added these features because downtime alerts are genuinely useful but it is difficult to implement without some sort of remote connectivity. And if your local utility needs the data for some reason, or needs the ability to coordinate power delivery to the grid, either now or in the future, there is a mechanism in which they can do so.

The number of users who consider this an anti-feature is such a small minority of users that it isn't really worth their time to accommodate. IOT certainly has its issues. TVs absolutely don't need it. For other appliances it can be a toss up. But there are also genuine use cases for it.

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> They aren't using these features to serve you ads.

Yet.

Experience tells me that everything will eventually turn into an ad or data collection platform.

Furthermore, even if there is indeed no nefarious intent from the third-party collecting & storing your system's telemetry, if you don't get any benefit from it, why give it to them? It's still a risk they (or a some malicious attacker, or the government) use this data in the future in a way you didn't expect.

This. I'd not expect to become advertisement fodder for a product that I pay regularly for. The inverter, on the other hand, is something I paid for once, so for years two through 25 (the expected lifetime), I'm essentially a cost to them as they operate whatever service that it talks back to. There's an incentive there to try and recover that cost, and they can't do it by increasing my monthly bill.

> I'd not expect to become advertisement fodder for a product that I pay regularly for

It's not always advertisements. Sometimes, the company will hire some oxygen waster that wants to boost "engagement" in order to justify their job and salary, so now your system is using your telemetry data to find ways to waste your time (as well as track whether they've indeed managed to waste it) even though advertisements themselves aren't (yet) involved.

Not to mention, advertisements don't have to be served over the same device that collects the data. The inverter company can very well collect the data, sell it to a data broker where other ad companies will use this data.

Please tell me how the output of a solar system will ever be useful to an ad company. The fact that you own a solar system is easily obtainable in a number of different ways (permit data, google earth, etc...). The fact that you own a solar system might provide some minuscule value to an ad company but the production data of that system is literally useless for ad targeting. A solar system is passive generation asset. It literally sits there and soaks up irradiance from the sun. The variation of that output is completely independent of the people that live in the house.

I once worked at a greentech firm. Someone's hackathon project one year used energy usage data to predict customers' stock prices.

Will it work on the micro level of an individual home? Maybe, maybe not, but the potential for that data to be used to model behavior is definitely there.

A little fuzzy AI and it will know your routine to the minute. It can guess what room you are in and what activity based on power usage alone. It is not only monitoring the sun, but how much power is left it can feed back into the grid.

The telemetry from a solar system includes the power being consumed in real-time, which can be used to infer occupation of the premises.

Data brokers accumulate various bits of data that are unreliable and useless on their own but in aggregate they can be used to "connect the dots". If an IP address & user agent pair or tracking cookie only lights up when the solar system detects significant power draw suggesting someone is at home, you can tie a pseudonymous IP or tracking cookie to the solar system data which presumably would include name or some other bit of identifying info.

Now repeat that with all the other information you've got and you're able to paint a very detailed profile off someone.

Everyone in this sub-thread is shifting the goal posts. There is no requirement that solar inverters need to be aware of household power consumption. You can certainly set that up if you want, but an installation in its most basic form would not include that feature. You simply connect the inverter to the house panel and what you don't use flows back through your utility meter and onto the grid.

And again, the solar data by itself is going to be nearly useless as it is entirely a function of the irradiance on the panels, and does nothing to reveal customer behavior.

Ads are 100 percent irrelevant.

But the lock-in is there regardless of whether they intended it or not. And, by they way, you are insane if you actually believe they do not intend a lock-in, given that they're making direct (and probably illegal) threats to "void the warranty" if you don't stay connected.

If they go out of business in 5 or 10 years, and your system stops working, you are screwed. The same applies if they just decide it's no longer profitable to support old products. Even if they are still in business, they are not going to do anything whatsoever to help you keep running without them.

The fact that most users are stupid enough to sign up under those circumstances doesn't change the fact that it's a stupid thing to do.

> But the lock-in is there regardless of whether they intended it or not.

Are you familiar with these systems at all? You can't lock someone into an inverter brand. If you don't like your current inverter, you just buy a new one and plug it into your system.

> If they go out of business in 5 or 10 years, and your system stops working, you are screwed.

I work in the industry. I can assure you that won't happen. These are not fly by night VC funded IOT companies selling $100 trinkets. The industry went through a rough patch ~5 years ago, a fair number of restructuring. Literally zero incidents where products were EOL'ed due to remote servers turning off. There are a number of reasons for this, I can go into more detail if you really want me to. But the gist of it is that these are revenue generating assets many of which have large financial institutions holding the bag. They have the leverage to make sure that these types of systems never turn off.

> You can't lock someone into an inverter brand

Challenge accepted. Just sell a fully integrated system that refuses to do anything if the incorrect inverter is connected.

You can't DRM a solar panel. But if you want to devote your life to trying, I am not going to stop you.

EDIT: And the more I think about, it is very unlikely that you could do the same to an inverter. You could certainly brick the control electronics, but the power electronics, the stuff that matters, it would be difficult. So snipping a few wires and swapping out some boards is probably sufficient.

How about this, if anyone on this thread ever has their inverter remotely shut off because a company goes out of business, I will personally volunteer to develop a work around.

> Are you familiar with these systems at all? You can't lock someone into an inverter brand.

Unless everything speaks standard protocols and can easily be swapped to a different control and monitoring system (including one the owner runs locally if they want to do that), you can lock somebody into a subscription, on pain of having to replace an expensive durable asset that should otherwise last a LONG time and requires expensive skilled labor to swap out.

And, without having read the ToS, I have a suspicion that you can also Alter the Deal under which that service is provided.

> The industry went through a rough patch ~5 years ago, a fair number of restructuring. Literally zero incidents where products were EOL'ed due to remote servers turning off.

5 years ago, how many installed, Internet-connected systems were already 5 or 10 years old? How many different backends were supporting them?

> But the gist of it is that these are revenue generating assets many of which have large financial institutions holding the bag.

I accept that that reduces the chance of them being turned off. I would in fact be interested in hearing more about this revenue model.

Of course, you now have me worried about the risks of them being remotely meddled with in various ways to suit the interests of whoever is providing this revenue. It's usually a bad sign if you buy something, but somebody else thinks it's still their "revenue generating asset".

> Unless everything speaks standard protocols and can easily be swapped to a different control and monitoring system

We are taking about AC and DC current. That is about as "standard" as it gets. Your panels produce DC current. Your inverter takes that current and converts it to AC. The AC current is then sent to your main panel. The inverter is a fraction of the cost of the entire system, and most inverters only last 8-10 years, so they are expected to be replaced a few times through out the lifetime of the system. It would be physically impossible to implement some sort of inverter level DRM that could then bind up your entire system. You could brick the inverter itself, but for reasons explained below that would be very unlikely.

> I accept that that reduces the chance of them being turned off. I would in fact be interested in hearing more about this revenue model.

I don't know the exact number, but the overwhelming majority of residential solar systems are financed, either through a lease or a PPA. The banks that offer this financing maintain lists of "bankable" equipment and in order to be eligible for financing the equipment used in a project needs to be on one of these lists. And to get on these lists manufacturers need to meet a number of requirements, one of which is that there are guarantees that in the event of a bankruptcy the equipment will continue to operate and that warranties will still be honored.

> Of course, you now have me worried about the risks of them being remotely meddled with in various ways to suit the interests of whoever is providing this revenue

That is a fair concern. But if you enter into a financial contract with an entity that has the ability and standing to shut off your solar system for whatever reason, then that is your own problem, and somewhat tangential from the topic in this thread. And FWIW, in practice it very rarely makes sense to turn these things off. It costs too much to repossess them, and the homeowner will just end up putting more money towards the utility bill to keep the lights on. Instead they just keep the electrons flowing and hope their collections department can sort things out.

Note how the conversation is actually about removed features, and inability to opt-in to unwanted features. This isn't a vehicle where you must choose between 2 or 4 wheels, but is a service where your purchase is sabotaged if you opt to prevent it from being sabotagable via an unnecesaary network connection. To use identical rhetoric, an air-gapped network is useful, and consumers need the ability to directly monitor and maintain devices in their custody, so there should be a mechanism for them to do so.

That's great that they provide those features - none of that is a reason to require an internet connection to use the solar panel at all.

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