After they make the change, someone with an old Hue bulb should go to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
Making this decision retroactive is clearly false advertising and anti-consumer. I don’t really give a shit what their terms of use were.
They can do what they want with their future bulbs. The old ones need to be grandfathered in.
Ah yes to make your lights work, we need all your data. Stuff like this is why I don’t have “smart” anything.
It’s perfectly possible to have a smart home that does not call home. Home Assistant is an amazing piece of software that can allow smart devices from different manufacturers talk to each other without connecting to a cloud service — all done locally.
This is the only way I would go about it. Maybe in the future if I really want it but really, the more tech, the more vulnerabilities. I’m fine with manually turning things on and off even if it’s self hosted.
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How
Put home assistant on a raspberry pi, plug a Zigbee dongle to it, and start connecting smart gadgets to it. Or better yet buy a home assistant Green. You can check the home assistant docs to see if a smart device requires cloud connectivity to work — in general if it connects through Zigbee (or ZWave or Matter) then you’re good, but if it connects through WiFi then it probably is cloud based.
https://www.home-assistant.io/
https://www.seeedstudio.com/Home-Assistant-Green-p-5792.html
Why do I need a RaspberryPi? I can’t use my regular Linux PC? What is a Zigbee dongle and why is it mandatory? What do I do if he device is cloud based?
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You can have plenty of smart home stuff without this junk using stuff like home assistant and keeping devices like this from phoning home. Some products won’t work at all without an internet connection but plenty still do.
If you do have an existing investment in Hue products, I suggest reaching out to them to request a refund because your purchase was made under a different policy, and this policy change is going to render your products useless without consent on your part. If they’re going to force a significant change that compromises the functionality of what might be hundreds of dollars worth of equipment without permitting recourse for legacy users, they should have to accept returns on what essentially is now a product you did not purchase and would not have purchased.
Isn’t the “take it or leave it” approach to consent considered consent bundling? Didn’t google get fined for doing a similar thing?
They’re light bulbs. What data can they possibly hold on the users beyond how bright they like their bulbs.
What times your lights are on or off can expose more than you might think over time. It reveals when you’re gone for work, your sleep schedule, how many days a year you spend at home vs traveling/elsewhere, when you stay up late, etc.
But it gets worse. If you give Hue your email or install the app then now you can be uniquely id’d across other products. Hue will sell that data to some advertising agency, who also buys data from Google, Facebook, etc. Now your usage data from other systems can be combined with the Hue data and used to more even more accurately track your day and behaviors.
Big data is a fascinating field, if not completely horrifying.
Thankfully, while I have a smart plug from them, I’ve made sure that it’s a Zigbee powered one, meaning it’s directly connected to my Home Assistant server over it’s own frequency/protocol, no app required. Guess that choice is paying off now.
Also, someone should tell whoever is managing that Twitter support account that you should never use the phrase “We’re sorry you feel that way”, even when you’re going for a non-apology.
reason: "your data isnt secure in your home, we need to control it. trust us. "
uh huh.
5 months later: “We had a data breach, but we believe they didn’t get all personal data”
Companies these days: “help us think of products we can sell to procure data. No, we don’t care what the product is; we just want the data.”
This is immensely frustrating. Feels like a rug pull for anyone that cares about their data, privacy and (ironically) security.
Welp, their products are completely out of the running for our setup then.
If I use Home Assistant for control and block the Hue hub from the internet, will things keep functioning as they are today?
I like how my stuff works and don’t want them to mess me up.
I would make sure the firmware can’t be updated. Uninstall the Hue app for sure.
Huehuehue
Start leaving 1 star reviews in the app stores from Google and Apple complaining about this.
They read those because stakeholders who understands nothing about tech only care for more stars.
I’m definitely starting to find a way out of hue and freezing my plans to buy more bulbs from them.
I hate to say it, but the Chinese competitor is better. Goveee doesn’t ask for shit and its bluetooth
Yeah… a Bluetooth light sounds terrible. I’d rather stick with ZigBee.
Bluetooth, eh?
That bulb is communicating with an app on your phone, and I don’t need to tell you how much data that little glass slab collects.
doesn’t ask for shit
Neither does a rapist. It just doesn’t give a shit about consent.
IoT stuff isn’t safe to use unless it’s flashed with a third-party Free Software firmware like Tasmota or ESPHome.
