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!
The Smart Home Trap: Is It Really Too Difficult To Use A Light Switch?
The Internet Person Challenge: imagine a context you haven’t yet experienced.
Impossible.
The internet was supposed to open our minds by letting us see the incredible diversity of how other people live their lives, but all we do 90% of the time is try to dunk on complete strangers (often imaginary ones, at that!) for not living exactly the same way.
I’ve met enough people that need accommodations to know that I have a horrible intuition about what’s going to be easy or hard for someone to do, and what will help or not.
IMO just let people do their thing. They know themselves better than you do.
(And if you see a story about how they’re getting exploited by an evil megacorp, and you feel the impulse to victim-blame, you can always just hit yourself in the dick with a hammer instead.)
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The challenge is not the light switch. The challenge is not stubbing your toe on the way to the bed.
You tell that to my kids 😂
No, but app-controlled lights are probably also the least useful aspect of a smarthome setup.
I just turned on my office light within Snap, an open source environment to teach kid programming, literally minutes ago. I didn’t even know that was possible 1h ago.
As others pointed out the point isn’t to replace a switch, the point is to get efficient or creative or both with your home. Of course if your mind can handle a switch with a light bulb, no need to do more.
PS: no data left my home, no WiFi requirement, no third-party proprietary app. Sure most “Smart Home” setup are horrible in many ways, both privacy and security, but it’s not because the most popular way sucks that all ways do.