Your household smart products must respect your privacy – including your air fryer
Your household smart products must respect your privacy – including your air fryer
'Last year, we asked the public for their views on smart products in a series of workshops. People shared concerns that products collect too much personal information, and said that they feel powerless to control how their data is used and shared'
Thank you to these people!
I will never allow IoT devices into this house unless they can be used offline.
I know everyone points out the problems with Nest, Ring, and various talking/listening/spying agents. For me, one of the worst offenders was a garage door motor that came with WiFi capability. Damn thing has the ability to just open up a door on my house on command. There's no way am I putting that online.
I bought a kettle with some WiFi features, but never planned to put it on my network as it works without it. Or was supposed to, at least. The thermostat was erratic and it needed a firmware update to fix it, only installable via this WiFi-connection. I set up a temporary VLAN just for the update, and disabled the VLAN right after. Then I took a shower.
I find it odd that one of its core features worked so poorly out of the box. And it's not like it was a way to trick me into connecting it either, as I first got a replacement part because they didn't know what the issue was.
Easy enough to enforce. Put all your IoT devices into their own subnet/VLAN with no Internet access. Then, you'll quickly see which devices you need to replace, or just not use as "smart" devices.
I have a ton of smart devices that don't even connect to wifi at all. None of them have Internet access of any sort.
Easy enough! except, that most people don't even know what is a VLAN, let alone have any network device that supports it. It takes a special kind of router to have such settings, and no, OpenWRT is not the solution for that as they have limitations on the minimum amount of memory the device has to have
It takes a special kind of router to have such settings
Eh, most good quality routers from reputable companies can handle separate VLANs just fine. My old Asus RT-N66U had that capability right out of the box.
But, as already stated, most people don't even change the default password on their router, much less know what a VLAN even is.
So it's a skill issue, then? Got it. Any old PC + a $10 pcie network adapter can be turned into a router capable of it.
Someone please make a Bluetooth equivalent for smart devices. My thermostat doesn't need internet access but standardized wireless control is still a good feature
ZigBee
I have multiple smart plugs in my house that monitor energy usage for various devices. I have them set up on Home Assistant via ZigBee. All completely local, works without internet.
Zigbee or z-wave for example?
P2P + IoT could be great for safety and privacy. We should just remove the middle men (datacentres, servers) so that data travels between the devices you own, and not via some data vampire trying to get in the way.
Oh fuck all this…
I only buy cheap shit. And I never, ever, ever ever ever connect anything to the net that doesn't absolutely need to be connected.
If I need an air fryer and the cheap one has smart shit on it. I will never connect that shit to the net. Never. Why the fuck would I? It's an air fryer. Not a laptop.
I completely agree. If it's a household appliance, it better not fucking connect to the internet.
I just recently started getting into smart home products such as smart plugs and stuff and I absolutely make certain that they don't have internet connection and use home assistant to keep the data local.
I will only use Zigbee or Z-Wave devices so that there's no way they can connect to the internet.