Mainstream tech advice treats cheap Wi-Fi smart plugs as harmless convenience, totally glossing over how much telemetry leaks out to overseas cloud servers by default.
Expecting casual users to set up VLANs and firewall drop rules just to stop a £10 light bulb from phoning home is a bit of a joke.
True privacy means local control without corporate middlemen.
Original content by The Unknown Universe, written by a human and not AI generated!
I think opening an app to turn on a lamp is more work than it’s worth. We actually avoid anything that requires an app at this point.
The key benefit of smart home tech isn’t to control stuff with an app instead of a switch, it’s to automate it so you don’t have to do anything at all.
Other than the thermostat, I can’t think of anything in my home that I want to change automatically without manual intervention.
I have a few “smart” plugs. I generally don’t use the app to turn them off or on, but being able to schedule them is what I think makes them valuable.
I bought the cheapest coffeemaker I could find that has a physical switch and plugged it into a smart switch so that it turns on every morning, Monday through Friday, at a specific time. On the weekends I do use the app because I can start the coffee brewing while I am still in bed and it will be ready when I get downstairs.
Could all of this be done without an IoT device? Yes, in college I had one of those old school mechanical timer switches to do the same thing. It is just that now I get more control over how it works.
The point of these isn’t just to “use an app” to do things you could easily do yourself, but to get additional functionality from an app that simply pushing a button couldn’t do.
I think you just described my coffee maker that I got from Costco. That’s a lot of extra steps to make a device that already exists.
I have that same Cuisinart from Costco, and the built-in program does just fine itself. There also must be a battery because the clock doesn’t lose time when the power goes out
Yes, a coffee maker that connects to the internet does exist, usually for more than I spent on everything involved, and also usually with its own headaches.
I find that usually those devices all want their OWN app installed, so instead of just your home assistant, you have HA, and the Mr Coffee app, and the GE app, and whatever else, each with their own requests for telemetry and whatnot.
Building your own out of simple devices gives you more control and an easier vector to secure.
But in your use case why does the coffee maker have to connect to the internet?
It doesn’t HAVE to be but it makes it easy to have a schedule that only runs in certain days and it allows me to turn it on from the other room.