cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/5717757
Today’s story is about Philips Hue by Signify. They will soon start forcing accounts on all users and upload user data to their cloud. For now, Signify says you’ll still be able to control your Hue lights locally as you’re currently used to, but we don’t know if this may change in the future. The privacy policy allows them to store the data and share it with partners.
Friends don’t let friends use
the cloudenshittified internet services. Stop signing up for subscription services for things that should never have a subscription. Stop giving companies your data. Even if they aren’t screwing you over today, they will tomorrow. It happens so often it’s just background noise on the news anymore. Just say no to putting your shit onthe cloudother people’s computers.the cloudother people’s computersI like that
I’m struggling to understand the reasoning behind this. Like these are just lightbulbs right? What’s the value in that data that I’m not seeing
…are you serious?
There would be so much data in understanding people’s light usage. For example, you could figure out how late or early people get up, number of people living in a house, how crowded the house is, how many lights are used per room, etc etc. it would be a gold mine of information.
Let’s say you’re a home automaton designer. You want to design devices to be used in the home, but in order to design such devices, you need enough of a stockpile of user data. This lightbulb data would be incredible valuable.
You can probably even analyse the data and determine things like whether someone is watching tv late at night.
From a nefarious view, how valuable would this data be to robbers and thieves?
They’re light bulbs, they emit light, it’s literally what you’re seeing
Edit: fuck, you people don’t understand humor. Is it not open-source?
sorry, alphabet bought humor last month.
Lately it is getting more like we are not just the consumers, we are the product. It is very uncomfortable.
I mean I’ll create an account and then block any of that data sharing on my router.
My whole house I sent up with Hue lights.
I’m Australian and I’ll be contacting the ACCC.
What does contacting the ACCC do exactly?
They are the reason Steam instituted a refund policy globally.
The ACCC have real teeth.
I have an adblocker for my home connection. By far, Hue subdomains are the most common blocked ones.
Philips Hue sends data to servers every few minutes.
How do you have this set up? Is the blocker software on your PC or is it a raspberry pi?
Adguard Home or Pi Hole, in a device that, indeed, can be a Raspberry Pi.
Is it that chatty because it keeps trying because you block it and it retries a lot?
It’d still be calling home without it, but maybe not as much as it seems?
Not necessarily. Sometimes I turn off the adblocker for days and still have the requests when turning it back.
A few years ago, I declared to my family that if they bring any “smart” appliances into the house, they (the appliances) would get the sledgehammer. They (the family) didn’t understand why.
Now they understand.
Home Assistant is the way. It even brought my old Music Flow speaker back to life!
Or you could learn about local only control for smart devices instead of being insane lol
Glad I still have the old bridge which is not compatible with the current app, and so they offer the legacy app separately. Though I assume it’s only a matter of time before the bulbs I have die and new bulbs require the new bridge.
Yep, glad I have my bridge blocked off from the internet, so they can’t force an update
Been on the fence about these for a while. Guess they made up my mind for me. Thanks!
isn’t hue a kind of vietnamese soup? bun bo hue?
Hue is a city in Vietnam. It’s where bun bo hue comes from.
Yes, so is this the same Hue as in the cloud?
oh wow. i have the GE cync bulbs, everyone says hue is better [which may well be true, the cync app is complete ass + trying to connect / troubleshoot] but maybe this evens things
Look guys I know you like your smart bulbs and your smart fridge and your smart mirror and your smart toilet paper but maybe MAYBE the inconvienence of having to get up and turn something on with a physical button and not having it connect to your phone is worth the freedom of knowing you haven’t and cannot be datacucked by every company that produces your stuff. Throw your bluetooth connected garbage in the trash and stop thinking that controlling home automation stuff with your spyware phone is cool.
Or take personal control. I have smart home stuff but I run Home Assistant and use ZWave devices, so it’s 100% local.
The average person just isn’t tech savy enough to locally host. Its easy to tell people to just host stuff themselves but its a lot of added complexity and maintenance responsibility that most just don’t want to deal with. I agree that it would be best if everyone just locally hosted all their services but we live in the real world where the average joe schmo is either too uneducated or busy with their life dramas to learn computer networking or just plain ol’ lazy and indifferent to giving up personal privacy as long as they can change RGB lighting with a phone app they are happy as peaches.
That’s not the easy way, though. People go for home automation in the first place to make something easy. Getting some awful proprietary spyware doodad to work with HomeAssistant is usually not the “just works” experience they’re looking for.
I had buttons for lights in my room as early as 1999 and I’m sure they existed before that. Also, the clapper exists lol. We don’t have to resort to a light switch like cavemen!
Lol good point!
I had to replace both my clothes washer and dishwasher in the past 6 months (19 and 22 years old respectively) and the clothes washer can connect to Wifi so I guess you can get notified that the cycle is done through their app. That feature will never get turned on. As for the dishwasher I bought the model that didn’t have Wifi. I mean yeah it’s cool we’re in the Jetsons world but the convenience you get isn’t really worth getting your information sold to everyone who wants to sell you an appliance.
Just get a bulb pre-flashed work either Tasmota or ESPHome. (ESPHome integrates well into home assistant, Tasmota is otherwise a bit more well rounded, but they’re both great)
did anyone actually go to the store and put a bunch of these in the cart?
Does that mean they’re abandoning zigbee and not adopting Matter/Thread?
