These battles were fought by general industry years ago over PLC Controllers. Vendors locked companies into having to buy their components because various manufactures devices would not talk (communicate) with other devices. These companies were smart enough to tell the suppliers of these PLC devices that they must communicate with other systems or they would refuse to buy their (locked) devices. Smart home is the wrong description!
Please check out your States Convention of States Project calling for the States to use Article V of the US. Constitution to reduce the power of the Federal Government (Repeal the 16th Amendment) # one. Term Limits for Congress # two. Thanks!
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@Kyle_Rankin thanks for the article link… hopefully we can get this discussion back on track 
I’m a big smart-home enthusiast, but yes, I’m also concerned about privacy and security. There are some fantastic technologies out there that enable smart home without compromise, or with cooperation if you choose. For example:
- Z-wave (and to a lesser degree Zigbee) enabled devices. Both Z-wave and Zigbee define standard protocols for implementing non-routable mesh networks - e.g. the devices are not connected to the Internet, not on your Wifi, and therefore cannot ever ‘phone home’. Plus, as we’ve seen in so many other technical areas, a standard protocol means you have a choice of tools, as opposed to just an ‘stack’ where you’re stuck. About 60% of the light switches and electrical outlets in my house are Z-wave enabled, using devices from companies like GE, Leviton, and Samsung. You can buy these off the shelf at most hardware stores, and integrate them with a ‘smart hub’ of your choice.
- Open source smart hubs. My preferred choice is HomeAssistant - I switched over completely from my closed-source Wink last year, and honestly could not be happier. I have control of all my Zigbee & Z-wave devices, as well as a ton of community help with other integrations. As an actual example, as the weather cools but the days are still sunny, I can actively time electrical heaters in my home to correspond to my solar production. I run my homeassistant locally, but for a small fee paid to the developer community, I can get outside access, or integration with Amazon or Google voice assistants, or enable a more respectful option for text-to-speech for my HomeAssistant : https://www.nabucasa.com/ . What a crazy idea - choice!
- Let’s not forget homebuilt projects. There are lots of little Arduino-ish devices that can run local Web APIs as well - making for fun projects you can integrate anywhere. I built a ‘smart’ thermostat myself using 8-segment displays and a rotary encoder, that would then poke some relays to manage electric heaters. It was able to ‘learn’ the curve on a small oil radiator, and manage switching it on & off to maintain a comfortable temperature range - all for <$50 and the joy of making.
So, don’t think you have to avoid ‘smart home’ altogether, because of privacy concerns. And don’t feel you have to lock in to the ‘big guys’ systems… between standard protocols, open source projects, and your own innovation, there’s really no reason to feel locked in, in your own home.
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Serious? I’m not living in the USA and have no idea what you’re talking about. What is “States Convention of States Project calling for the States”?
Sorry my bad!
Are there any viable solutions yet for a self-managed ring-like doorbell/camera solutions where ONLY you have control over your data be it on-premise or in a cloud? I have yet to find a good open source hardware and/or software solution yet.
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Do the spyware solutions work if you use your firewall/router to block access to the internet by the device?
At least ring cameras only saves video back to the ring.com mothership, so no. That’s what I mean.
I have yet to find a turn key solution that allows you to save your video on premise.
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Have you thought of some kind of DIY version, such as with a Raspberry Pi? https://www.instructables.com/DIY-Smart-Home-Doorbell-for-Less-Than-40/
Not exactly turn-key, though.
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Yeah, even Rob Braxman demonstrated a viable solution (see below) except for the remote access requirement, but the problem is he didn’t have time to support it. Would be a great candidate for the next Purism offering or someone else that had the resources and expertise to deliver a turnkey solution, IMHO.
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I’m sure he can return to the US any time he wants.
No, the Patriot Act allows them to get a court-issued warrant to monitor alleged terrorists under specific circumstances (all outlined in the legislation… have you read the Patriot Act by any chance instead of listening to 100 Edward Snowden interviews as ‘fact’? Hint… it’s a source of law rather than an opinion from a jaded defector).
There’s a massive gap between being allowed to investigate terrorists/paedophiles online and having a surveillance state that rivals that of China/Russia. Sorry to burst your bubble.
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“Sorry to burst your bubble” 
Ah yes, mature and polite I see.
Anyways, I’m not sure what “sources” you would accept. BBC perhaps?
Or perhaps Wikipedia:
Or maybe PBS
Maybe Reuters:
There are a lot of sources out there It doesn’t take much to find them. That Snowden provided the documentation, rather than just making claims, is why it made such news.
Respectfully, you’re confusing espionage and counter-terrorism measures with China/Russia-style authoritarian, surveillance state style behaviour.
It’s always been public knowledge that the USA (along with every other country in the world) has spies that will obtain secret information from other countries. Sure it’s embarrassing when somebody steals an HD from a spy agency and gives it to the press (identifying who was spied on) but this is mischievous behaviour rather than the exposure of a tightly held secret that the US has spies.
What the US does NOT do is block pro-China propaganda from the internet, restrict your hours spent doing online gaming, arrest you if you send WeChat messages that are pro-HK/Taiwan independence and lock you up with false crimes if you’re organising the country’s main opposition party (because opposition parties are pretty much illegal).
There’s a wide gap. While I sorta get how people turn down this path of reasoning, I find it pretty odd when people start running the argument that the existence of espionage, counter-terrorism and child protection measures amounts to free democracies being surveillance states.
My only guess is that such hysteria comes from people who are used to seeing the internet as a protected bubble that nobody can monitor (unlike phonecalls and the physical world). This I get because as a kid it pretty much was, ay! It was new, people didn’t quite understand the dangers and you could get away with a lot more because law enforcement agencies took some time to catch-up. That’s changed for the better now though. Cops now have the tools to prevent things like 9/11 and online child abuse. I’m sorry if this inconveniences you…
I don’t think I’ve seen the link posted, so, for everyone here is a link to the Patriot Act. It is pretty long, but I didn’t see anything allowing the government to collect hundreds of millions of American’s phone records. And since President Obama admitted to and worked to revise this practice (links in my last post), we know it happened.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/107th-congress/house-bill/3162/text
Here is then NSA director James Clapper lying to Congress about spying on Americans:
Can you folks please start up a separate Round Table topic if you’d like to discuss this? I’d very much like this thread to be about the article I wrote. It would be disappointing to have to lock my own thread but I think any discussion about the topics in my post (and the helpful discussion of potential “smart home” alternatives) are being drowned out by this rehashing of Snowden-era debates.
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Sorry Kyle Will do, no more responses on Snowden in this thread.
I do like your article! And the Smart Home (and smart cars, etc) make me nervous.
My family started going down the Smart Home route (Amazon Echo, smart light-bulbs, things like that). Wifi printers make me nervous now too… what do those printers phone home about?
I was also (and still am) an iOS developer, though I was getting frustrated with Apple’s “walled garden” by then.
I was looking for alternatives (in my personal life) to iOS (Android has its own issues) that actually led me to find Purism, and the Librem 5 I heard about it in 2018 off Linux Action News.
If history repeats itself, people will gleefully adopt the Smart Home even if it leads to being locked into a single vendor and a new walled garden. My direction is to now askew IoT devices (including that spy-speaker, the echo), and do whatever I can with free software solutions.
For a “smart speaker”, I’ve played with Mycroft. That was a couple years ago, using a Raspberry Pi. My biggest concern, even with Mycroft, is that I want the voice recognition/transcription to be done locally, via the device or an indoor computer. I don’t know if Mycroft has gotten there yet… if so, I might give it a try again
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Not to mention … being subject to massive amounts of surveillance.
The counterquestion is: what happens if you firewall the printers from phoning home? (which is usually pretty easy unless you need exotic things like being outside your home but printing things on your home printer) You may be able to block the phoning home just using DNS.
Maybe they are reporting page yields. Maybe they are reporting whether you are using overpriced genuine ink cartridges v. third party v. refilled. Maybe they are checking for firmware updates. Some printers may use NTP to pick up the correct time.
I have two always-on built-in-networked printers and I can see that one of them has done absolutely no DNS lookups - while the other is doing a few lookups in a burst about every 7 days. I should probably look into that more closely.
This * 1000. Until that happens, I will be completely ignoring that functionality.
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I agree with almost all your assertions except for the US does NOT block naïve assertions. When a former US President can be de-platformed by Big Tech along w/ the suppression of ANY posts that run contrary to the accepted narratives (a.k.a. propaganda), then that country is not far from overt totalitarian regimes like China/Russia, although a case can be made that perhaps the CCP has invested heavily in US politicians, mainstream media, and big tech to covertly control the US narratives in their favor. I’m not a huge conspiracy theorist, but all China’s 100 year plan and objective to become THE DOMINANT world power by 2035 is reality and as always in the history of the world, #FollowThe$$$ which is ALWAYS the means to the ultimate end–POWER.
In the practical art of war, the best thing of all is to take the enemy’s country whole and intact; to shatter and destroy it is not so good. So, too, it is better to recapture an army entire than to destroy it, to capture a regiment, a detachment or a company entire than to destroy them
– Sun Tzu, The Art of War, Attack by Stratagem, 5th Century BC
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Last warning to keep this on topic. As I said, you can take your political discussion to Round Table if you want.
In the interest of trying to keep this thread alive instead of locking it, I’m going to just delete any new off-topic comments continuing the political discussion in my thread instead of taking it to a new thread.
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