12 mo. ago • 100%

The Man Amazon Erased

www.tabletmag.com The Man Amazon Erased

Where do you go when your smart home decides you’re not welcome?

A man who got kicked off a service because of an alleged remark.

34 comments

Shameless plug for Home Assistant, here. Everything is controlled locally (unless you pay for their internet pass through service which is basically just a relay), most brands of smart devices are supported, you have extreme customization capabilities, and it's all open source.

Plus, it can run on pretty much anything.

60
- Shameless plug for just using your little fingies to operate the light switches and thermostats. Everything is controlled locally and you only have to pay for the light and the switch (fingers should be included in your default setup)
  
  26
  
  The moment I had the ability to turn off all light, A/Cs and what not when I leave the house, I can't look back, plus I don't have give up my privacy.
  
  15
  
  Fingers may be included in most setups, along with actuators like arms or legs often required to approach the finger to the switch, but they still come with a wetware control unit that gets easily distracted by anything from puppies, to the fear of being late for work.
  
  10
  
  They aren't mutually exclusive, I have a few smart lights and I try to plug them into switched outlets so I can turn them off manually and also control digitally.
  
  3
This is the reason my house has:

mechanical locks

mechanical windows

routers using OpenWRT

no smart home crap

no Alexa/Google Assistant/...

no internet connected thermostats
42
- Fwiw, I think using a self hosted home automation setup (shout out to home assistant) paired with smart devices that don't use internet (e.g. zigbee, zwave, or matter once it comes out) can allow you to have a smart home without these kinds of fears.
  
  That said, I would definitely agree to using mechanical locks. Although a monitored smart security system is probably still a good idea - you're letting a company virtually enter your house, but you can't rely on a self hosted solution to notify you when your power goes out, for example.
  
  36
  
  This, I have plenty of smart home stuff all run locally, and every external call is something I can control and disable. Having a smart home isn't inherently the problem; outsourcing all the computation to cloud servers run by unaccountable corporations is the problem
  
  18
  
  My experience from watching lockpicking lawyer is that locks are just social niceties that tell others 'please don't go here' and have no real ability to stop anyone who doesn't care. Other than the owner who gets locked out by forgetting their own key of course.
  
  13
  
  Unless I’m mistaken, don’t HomeKit compatible devices need to be local-first too? I remember reading that if I switch my Ecobee thermostat to HomeKit (via HomeAssistant’s bridge), it will use local control instead. It’s on my todo list but I just haven’t done it yet.
  
  I think this thread about Ecobee and HomeKit was where I started…
  
  2
  
  And if the power goes out?
  
  1
And this is why you shouldn't allow things essential to your life to be mediated by some faceless tech giant. Self-hosting may be more effort, but you can at least guarantee that any issues won't be as a result of some bureaucratic nonsense or administrative error. This is not just smart home stuff - there are similar examples affecting email, photo galleries, file storage, etc. etc.

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On one side, critics lambasted Jackson as a dupe for having smart devices in the first place; [...]

Yah ... that.

13
- Having smart devices isn't dumb, but you have to implement them properly.
  
  It's dumb to hand control of your smart home over to a 3rd party, though.
  
  9
- This is victim blaming. He isn't at fault for trusting a company to have the bare minimum of respect for his property and autonomy, the company is at fault for not actually having that respect. Whether the company is actually trustworthy is as immaterial as saying someone "deserved" to have their car stolen because they forgot to lock it.
  
  You can criticize him for not being cautious in this low-trust environment, but don't let it get to the point where the party actually at fault gets off without criticism.
  
  7
  
  This is victim blaming.
  
  Only to some degree. The guy is a software engineer and should have known better. I'd agree if it was Jenny from accounting. You could just as well point out "victim blaming" when I called someone a moron for jumping from a three storey building and breaking his legs, because it was neither his intention nor was he aware that it could break his legs. For a software engineer to employ cloud based "smart" devices and then wonder if it backfires is borderline moronic.
  
  2
If I ever get into smart home crap, I'll definitely be aiming for a local network solution >_>

11
- Go Home Assistant. They're getting closer to having an offline voice assistant too, so soon you won't need to use rhasspy or another open source solution.
  
  I'm in the process of developing a whole home HAL9000 system.
  
  9
  
  Remember to be very specific about what he can lie about.
  
  1
  
  Better make sure your HAL has no concept of pod bay doors.
  
  1
- Ikea's line of smart home stuff is the best generally available consumer friendly smart home stuff I've seen so far. All zigbee based, hub isn't required, has local control and open APIs.
  
  7
Stories like this are why I've never really found the concept of a smart home appealing. I'm perfectly content to do it all analog, but hopefully there's an alternative out there for folks who think differently than I do.

8
- There are very good and fairly easy solutions for self hosting smart home functionality. Im using homeassistant which runs locally on my own hardware, and all my smart functionality is controlled locally so it works even without internet. And should my server crash, everything just defaults to normal "dumb" control.
  
  5
Oh, this is the same story from June. This can basically happen to anybody who uses their Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Apple, Twitter, Facebook, .... account for anything important. All of these companies have very limited recourse for customers who got banned. I'm surprised he even found out why they banned him LOL

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