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.
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.
Well, look who’s looking like an idiot for setting up my entire house with Hue lights recently after running two bulbs with local control for years… sigh it’s getting mighty frustrating having to deal with companies hoarding your data.
Those lights use ZigBee, right? Should’ve work with HomeAssistant and a ZigBee dongle?
They do, that’s how I control mine. They haven’t been connected to a hurricane bridge in over a year at this point
Yeah, I’ll look into that. It’s just a shame to have to do extra work and spend extra money because a company decides to screw you over after your purchase.
Know a good ZigBee dongle for home assistant?
I just bought the skyconnect. It will also support Thread soon!
LIDL is selling a bunch of “smart” crap this week including a “smart” kettle. According to the blurb “Can be linked to the Lidl Smart Home System using your WiFi connection”. And I’m thinking yeah and what possible reason ever would I have for needing that? And the same is true for most smart products.
Actually, having hot water for tea or coffee ready when you wake up is one of the few really good use cases.
First ‘public’ webcam stream was of a coffeepot to see if it was full or not, so more folks agree with that. How about making a cup in bed and then walking towards a fresh cup, it’s as if you had a very specific morning butler. I’m aware this is not a need (and I don’t have or need it), but it’s desirable for sure.
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)
You don’t understand, your lights need to track you, how else are they going to improve your user experience? Using lights is so complicated that it requires them to train AI models to better understand the necessities of users. The methods that have worked for hundreds of years cannot work with today’s users
Hue has this thing called Hue Labs and it’s the shittiest UX ever. It’s an internal browser in the Hue app to add special things like color changing patterns. In Hue Labs it is about 25% useful features you’d want in the app (things like triggering a routine with a Hue button), 25% fun things you’d want in the app (like color gradients), and 50% of the wackiest shit you’ve ever heard of. Seriously there’s a damn officially Star Wars force game in there or something? I just want to make my lights be spooky and change colors.
And I really cannot overstate how shitty the UX is for it. Compare it to Lifx where you just tap the color gradients you want and it’s on. You have to add the thing to your account, then make one for each color combo, it’s insane.
I’m pretty sure basic usage statistics were updloaded previously as well without an account. Now they want you to login, give jucy permissions on your phone and upload all the “usage” data … for security.
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?
If you want it to block IoT and other device connections, you have to pass all network through it.
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.
Its actually illegal under the Consumer Rights Act 2015 in the UK for a product to force a change on its functionality after you bought it.
Also surprised if EU law will allow this ?
I for one will be seeking a refund for the products either directly or through a court just to show them up.Update Note Showing Consumer Rights Act 2015 “Goods Not Fit For Purpose” alone is enough to demand your money back. https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2015/15/section/10
and as it relies on digital content to support them and this is where the main problem is, section 40 applies where they changed it for the worse
https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2015/15/section/40Can’t Hue just turn off everyone’s lights in the EU if the law doesn’t allow this change in terms of service?
That would be a charge in functionality.
No they’d have to make the lights just work if the EU got involved. AFAIK
Also, pretty sure it’s illegal in California to under CCPA, but there they could just turn off the lights. Which is why CCPA needs change in functionality clauses.
I’m not going to create an account. What I will be doing is looking for an alternative setup that is simple and completely local or just go back to traditional led bulbs.
This is easy for me with just one room using Hue. I feel for those who have them for all or most lighting around their home.
A raspberry pi4, Home Assistant software, a zigbee dongle, and any zigbee-compatible smart bulb.
By default, the traffic never leaves your local network, and all your smart-crap still works if the internet goes out. At one point, it had a learning curve like a brick wall, but over the last year or two, they’ve done a spectacular job of improving the user experience. it’s still not perfect, but it’s far better than the commercial alternatives and won’t harvest your entire life for metadata it can sell.
Thanks LrdThndr, I’ll be looking into this setup. :)
Home Assistant on a Raspberry Pi with a Zigbee dongle and zigbe2mqtt. Your Hue bulb will work just fine. You can even mix them with Ikea / Aqara / Ali / Tuya stuff if you’d like.
That sounds pretty good. I’ll look into this, thank you!
Remember, just a few years ago when the latestagecapitalism sub was created and everybody was like ha ha you lefties, and now every single big corporation is self immolating in 2023… good times!
and now every single big corporation is self immolating in 2023
I think that’s overstating it a smidge. I don’t see there being much impact for many of these companies beyond schadenfreude for those of us watching. Twitter’s going to die, but since Musk obviously doesn’t care it takes a lot of the satisfaction from it. Most of these others - I doubt it’s more than a blip.
Not that I don’t agree with and cheer for your overall point. I just don’t think most of this is moving the needle in any direction.
and now every single big corporation is self immolating in 2023
The overwhelming majority of people simply do not care. So no, they’re not self-immolating. They understand that people don’t give two shits.
removed by mod
Been on the fence about these for a while. Guess they made up my mind for me. Thanks!
It was potential decisions like this that made me stop using various IoT devices in my life.
And year after year, i am proven right.
With Home Assistant and locally controlled devices there’s no issues whatsoever. Completely locally controlled and solid as a rock ime.
Once I heard this news I finally took the plunge on home assistant.
Been a learning curve but absolutely worth it, so much better than the first party control solutions.
I wish I could get there. It works 90% of the time. I can’t figure out what is going on between Zigbee2MQTT and actually updating state. One every week or two I need to reboot the Raspberry Pi to resolve issues. Definitely more reliable than the cloud, but I am not sure what is going on.
As long as you can find devices which let you do local only setup…
True, but thankfully there are a lot of choices in that space, and it’s constantly growing. And if there aren’t, a lot of times it’s possible to make one (or buy someone’s) using an esp32 or similar. Zigbee, zwave, and matter devices should all be possible to run local only.
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.
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.
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.
My neighbor bought a wifi enable rat trap the other day. It notifies her when it’s been triggered and send a picture of the cage.
A fucking rat trap and she felt the need to spend and extra $40 just so she can share her rat infestation data.
Its important to know exactly when the rats neck gets snapped with screenshots and the exact velocity trajectory of the spring charted on a data plot, otherwise how else would you for sure the trap got the rat at maximum efficency?
Often not how traps work
Usually it catches a limb or tail and then the rat either starves or chews off whatever got trapped
Being notified when it goes off you could go check right away to release the rodent elsewhere (or quickly kill it if releasing its not your thing)
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!
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.Just say no to putting your shit on the cloud other people’s computers.
Unfortunately self-hosting is not a realistic solution for the vast majority of the population. Even the best solutions out there for self-hosting are way too complex for most people. If it’s not close to “point-click-done”, with no debugging or maintenance whatsoever, it’s just not a viable solution for most people. I’m decent with tech and do self-host a few things, but it’s a complete PITA compared to “cloud” options.
I don’t use the cloud and I also don’t self host.
Occasionally I have to put up with a minor inconvenience like putting a file on a USB stick and carry that physical USB stick with me. The horrific inconvenience! How do I survive
My big issue is rarely with data i need myself, but data i need to share with other people. Using physical storage to pass this between us is not a solution as we would need to send that via mail.
Manually moving files across my devices all the time is also a nuisance that i prefer not to deal with.
Thats way we have to organize us in groups running strong homeserver behind VPN and proxy running all kinds of FOSS web services and federate those services with other groups.
A tech-noob should trust his local Sysadmin, not some (foreign) company
That’s still putting your data in some internet rando’s computer, because “trust me bruh!”…it’s still putting it in " the cloud", but now in a way that is nearly completely impossible to enforce things like GDPR
Well, it’s not a random guy on the internet, it’s a guy in the neighborhood that you meet regularly (like a friend for example) and you trust. Well that’s the case for me, and I even grown out of noob state in many IT related stuff thanks to that. I bet anyone has that one guy (or girl of course) who is constantly talking about privacy, not? That’s the people you support and for example providing financial support on server parts in return for a save heaven for your data. But of course, if you trust nobody than yourself, you gota be Sysadmin yourself.
I know someone like this.
He’s so burned out from doing it as a full time job he can’t be bothered to set up his own system, much less everyone else’s. (He sometimes helps me with stuff, with the understanding that he will answer questions and that’s about it after it’s been set up)
Maybe if he were to charge for the service and labor and quit his regular job, and just do nothing but troubleshooting all day (frustrating and tiring in its own way). But assuming people were into that (which they typically aren’t, especially not enough to pay for it, which is part of the frustration), being security focused and enjoying that stuff for yourself becomes a lot of work very very quickly when you do it for others.
Yea, he is Crazy about work but he likes it that way, he does way more hours for his main job than he would have to (no fear, he gets paid accordingly) and does the Sysadmin work as a hobby. I mostly manage the stuff with UI (all the *arr web apps) and pay for Indexers. Our Plex lifetime is also initially purchased by me. So thats how we got there. Now we have nextcloud and soon the first activityPub instances
Yeah, guy I know isn’t crazy about work, and was a sysadmin (now security). Burned right out. He bought the Plex lifetime for me, though, because I enjoy curating the library and he likes free streaming (and can afford it which I really can’t).
He mostly just answers questions for me (which is challenging because I’m really good at asking the questions that lead me to fully understanding, and those tend to be fairly specific) and explains things I don’t understand when possible. He doesn’t do any self-hosting (other than a coax-based tv channel that runs my Plex and nothing else), preferring to leave to to me to handle… says it’s too much work and too expensive to be worth it, even knowing fully the alternatives (ofc thinking like a sysadmin, he’s thinking raid5 and full servers and stuff whereas I just have an old-ish dedicated pc for that lol.)
Plus side, I’m learning a lot. Downside, learning this stuff while not having a strong tech foundation is hard!
My next foray is into automating my *arr, and setting up self-hosts for things like photos, comics, games, maaaaaaybe Lemmy, and music (Plex does ok with music tho, so maybe just adding last.fm to it will do the job. I don’t listen to music; the need is not my own, so I need something robust and host-hands-off)
He does help me with a few things I really don’t understand though, like complex tunnel/router configuration, setting up pihole (I can do that myself now) and hosting my home vpn (I could probably do this, but he does it for me for now with a custom domain) but it’s almost the exact opposite of what you described as the dynamic lol
Maybe I should be “that girl”, but I’d be tempted to snoop. Very very tempted. “Don’t trust me with your data” level of tempted.
I think you’re severely overestimating the closeness of people’s relations to neighbors and availability of people with the skills to pull this off with high enough stability for other people to want to use it…and all in their free time outside of their regular job and personal life.
In that case, I underestimated my luck having such friends…
I think you’re severely overestimating the closeness of people’s relations to neighbors
I think you’re speaking for yourself here.
Maybe, maybe not…it will vary greatly from country to country whether or not close social interaction with neighbors is the norm.
removed by mod
the cloudother people’s computersI like that
Just listened to the audibook version of this not that long ago. This is the kind of shit they should be teaching people about in school now.
Glad I was always broke enough to not buy their bulbs
