Haier hits Home Assistant plugin dev with takedown notice

Those users don't send usage data back to Haier that they can then sell to other companies

It is insanely petty. Perhaps they don't want people reverse engineering their APIs, but all their competitors and threat actors likely do it, just not on a public repo.

I'm in nearly B as I usually only buy things with proper protocols, e.g Zigbee, that might not need a dedicated plugin. So obviously Haier is now a company I won't buy anything from and will actively not recommend to anything who cares about my opinion on IoT.

This is the great thing about FOSS. Someone else will just take the code and reupload it. If they want it removed from GitHub, they can deal with Microsoft. At which point it'll just be re-uploaded again. There's nothing illegal about it.

So Haier suffers the Streisand effect and the people who want to simply continue using it.

It would be a shame if 697 people and counting were to fork the project, it would be a real pain to serve each one of them with takedown notices.

Sad, isn’t it? For fun, look up Whirlpool, Albertsons, and Kroger on Wikipedia to see all the brands they own. No wonder prices are high when so much competition has been eliminated.

Their follow-up:

I have written to Haier to try to get some clarification and perhaps an agreement. I hope Haier will listen to us now that so many people are supporting us. Thank you all!

Dear Haier team,

you have probably noticed that my announcement to delete the plugin has met with a lot of displeasure from the community. There are a number of people who bought your appliances not only because of the good price/performance ratio, but also because they can be integrated into home assistant.

I think it would be helpful to the discussion if you could explain the following questions:

   Please provide details of WHICH clauses of terms of service does this project violate?
   What is an unauthorized manner?  
   What significant economic harm is being faced by the company? (in terms of dollar figures)
   When did these projects violate your intellectual property?

I'm sorry if some people have gone over the top, but this doesn't have to escalate and there doesn't have to be a bad reputation for your brand in the open source community.

Can we find a common solution here? Can I do something to make the plugins use the API more economically? Should we reduce the polling? I would like to release a new version that uses the API in a way that does not harm your business. You can also consider an official home assistant integration, the home assistant guys would like to get in touch with you for that. This would be a great competitive advantage within the smart home community.

I hope to get an answer and until then I'll leave the repos online.

Andre

I’m lazy, can you share your email so I can send a copy?

Loss of 3rd party data sales from the tracking embedded in their apps would be my guess.

The only way I see a company like this having "significant economic harm" from you not using their free app is if 1) they eventually plan to charge a fee to use the app or 2) they profit from data their app collects about you (third party data sales, for example).

Not something I'm interested in either way, so they've lost a potential customer.

Specifically, the plug-ins are using our services in an unauthorized manner

By plug-ins, you mean your customers?

Im expecting that HA provides a better experience because it might be hitting their services more than their own app, and they haven't costed the resources for hosting their service to include those extra requests coming from HA?

One of the problems with the cloud-polling integrations is that they will frequently poll the back-end APIs to get the current status of that device. A normal user might only open up the app once or twice a day and call the APIs, but these integrations will go 24/7 every 10s-5m. That can add up to a non-trivial amount of traffic. If there's 100 users opening it up once a day, that's not a lot of traffic, but 10 users polling every 1 minute is equivalent to 15k people doing something once a day.

I actually saw one of my integrations I used defaulted to updating every 10 seconds. I decreased that because I didn't want to draw attention to it.

A business will look at their usage and ask why there's more than expected traffic. They could be running their server on a potato. They could go back and support Matter, that costs money, requires skilled engineers, and cuts into profit margins.

While it sucks, that is something they could point to in a court about "economic harm".

Genuine link as verified from https://github.com/Andre0512/hon#support

You are right, TOS isn't the law. However businesses will try to trick you with this technique, especially if they don't think you have any legal support. You can't commit a crime just because the victim agreed to it, no amount of contracts negate this. Employers often pull this trick to force employees to accept illegal practices.

The person hosting and publishing the code may have never agreed to the TOS. So can't be bound by it. They also can revoke their agreement, and no longer have to comply with it. However, continued use of the businesses web services likely requires agreeing to the TOS and this plug in may be using the businesses web services to make the plugin work.

They're not gonna DRM the compressor, are they?

Please don't give them ideas.

It's what was done for Panasonic ACs: https://www.espthings.io/index.php/2023/09/02/esphome-panasonic-climate-interface/

I'm sure somebody will take a really close look at Haier ACs now.

There is no market for doing this at all, why would any company worth their salt do it?

An F&P induction range was on our short list for an upcoming replacement to our aging gas range. It is now off the short list. Not sure how many API calls a $8000 range would have paid for, but I'm sure they'll be happy to know my HA server won't be pinging them any time soon.

When it actually backfires. Right now, no company was actually hurt by doing stuff like this - quite the opposite, they get a boost since they close down their ecosystem further forcing people to buy their stuff.

There will be "boycotts" but in reality it will blow over in two to four weeks, with people forgetting "an outrage" that didn't reach 99% of their target users at all.

Who is on the allow list in terms of appliances like washing machines?