Home Assistant. Offline smart home automation you can control.
Home doesn’t have to be 100% dumb in 2023. But you have to do a little work for it.
Bonus: your smart home will be more capable and interconnected than any of the commercial smart home options because they are all busy trying to control the entire ecosystem and sue each other. (maybe Matter changes that but I’m not holding my breath)
Also for security cameras, connect them to something like a Synology NAS so you have the recordings locally and then configure a firewall to block the cameras from any internet access.
Viewing the cams remotely just means using a VPN to connect to your network and then connecting to the NAS.
It’s possible to maintain privacy/control and still use modern tech.
One thing I would say is that the camera stream will hammer those disks. They will always be busy. I chose not to run this way and instead loaded up a W10 VM with Blue Iris. I have the vm on a dedicated VM server with raid1 SSDs.
My Synology has large disks and does other duties. That’s the main reason I didn’t want that extra I/O.
What kind of SSDs? I hope you bought enterprise or you are going to get a nasty surprise in about a year…
Eh, even if your prediction came true, it is not so nasty if it happens. I have others and rebuilding is an inconvenience. I also have backups.
I went for the Crucial mx500 ones. They seemed to have the more positive reviews when I last checked. We will see.
I’d you’re rich enough to own your own security cameras I think you can afford some hard drives.
That’s ridiculous. The disks were far more than the cameras. And why be wasteful of those costs I’ve already shouldered? I am as miserly as I can be when spending on my infrastructure.
If you can’t afford the disks I’m wondering how you can afford a house
But I mean, that’s the price of security cameras. You just gotta accept you will need to cycle disks every once in a while, and delete old data.
Why do you think I cannot afford more disks? Or a house? You incorrectly assume too much and seem unnecessarily argumentative.
I have already bought the disks and see no reason to work them overly hard for camera surveillance. I worked out another solution that others might be interested in. That’s what this thread is about.
Maybe I should have clarified a bit then, but
I really don’t see why you would need to own security cameras if you don’t own a house? If you’re renting that’s not your job, and if you live in an apartment… Well, why do you need security cameras in your apartment? Unless you own the building?
My point was mostly that like, a couple of disks is not a big expense, and not something I feel is worth fussing over, personally.
Perhaps he can afford things because he knows how to apply his knowledge to be more frugal with things like this. If you can work around disk lifespan limitations, you’d be wasteful not to do so.
I use Enterprise drives in mine set up with Synology Hybrid Raid and a full copy of the NAS on another “NAS” (it’s actually a USB attached storage from QNAP).
Also, set the video streams to h264 or h265 and the bandwidth is lower.
It’s been fine so far.
What tics me off is a lot of the big box store brands of cameras don’t allow you to save locally - they don’t bother putting in the feature because then they couldn’t sell you a cloud storage subscription, or they just have the audacity to lock it behind a paywall so you have to pay a subscription to use your own damn hardware.
What do you use for a voice assistant/ speaker mic set up?
That’s the only thing holding me back. And the Mycroft stuff blew up. :(
Honestly I rarely use voice controls for my setup. It’s all time/motion triggers. Voice commands are for weird one offs.
This is HomeAssistant’s year of the voice. It’s all built in now; they just released wake word capabilities.
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Google because they have the best voice control and I’ve already given them my data through Gmail, search, and for many years chrome. It’s the one compromise I make because the product is good enough it’s worth the cost to me. But if you don’t want them having your data, your voice options are pretty limited.
It’s really easy to control it with voice by basically replacing Google assistant on an android device. Look up the Wyoming Protocol interaction in Home Assistant
You can use Sonos speakers or any generic smart speaker that is not bound to a brand (like Google /Alexa)
Pro tip, Ikea smart speakers are rebranded Sonos at lower prices, and come hidden in all kinds of furniture forms.
However you don’t need to wholesale jump to HA and lose voice. For $8 CAD I got the Nabu-casa HA cloud assistant and SSL proxy (portal to your home HA without need to punch holes in firewalls) and their cloud assistant integrates with Google or Alexa.
So you can tie everything together and then move things over to the HA ecosystem as you have time, eventually cutting the Google/Amazon limbs off.
Thanks for this. I am going to look into it.
Not OP, but I use Google Assistant at the moment. Gonna switch as soon Home Assistant makes it possible.
You supposedly can connect Google home/Alexa to Home Assistant but it’s not for the feint of heart. I’m just starting this and it’s not a weekend project. Might be a few days before it’s up and running.
The main issue holding me back is that I don’t want Amazon to link my house electronics to my actual account.
I set it up on its own VLAN and I’m starting to onboard it but hit a bump when it asked for my Amazon account credentials. So when I have some free time, I’m going to create a dummy Amazon account that will be used to control Alexa. Probably hook it up with a Privacy credit card set to burn after the first purchase with a limit of $5.
There is a plan to integrate these more tightly into Home Assistant, but it won’t be for a while.
Ooh whenever I have the budget for this it looks amazing
It can be a bit of work, but if you’re a tech geek you’ll enjoy shopping for / making compatible devices and getting it all set up.
Software developer. Having my home constantly phoning home to megacorporations sounds creepy, but more importantly, none of these smart home products solve a problem. They just add additional points of failure to appliances that have historically been sufficiently reliable.
Software developer. The frequency of stupid features that PMs request, followed by our urgency to implement it as fast as possible has opened up so many bugs and issues. Knowing that, why the hell would I want to open up potential failure to things I expect to work 100% of the time, like a toaster?
Software programmer. I have a Google Home running because I’m lazy af and like to be able to verbally turn on/off lights. I also use it to combat ADHD symptoms because saying “set an alarm” is less likely to distract me from what I’m doing than pulling out my phone is.
Indeed. Like what is fridge? Motor with piston in a puddle of oil and a thermostat. Why the fuck it needs any corpo bullshit?
Smart lights solve a problem. I have LEDs with programmable scenes that I can swap to easily. I don’t have white light constantly on all times of the day.
“Alexa! Switch to lighting configuration ‘McLuvin’”.
Hey Google, it’s sexy time
Even better, have them on a timer and geofence like I do. When dusk falls, the lights turn on. When the last person leaves, all off. At 1am, all turn off except driveway lights. At dawn, all turn off. I never even interact with my lights anymore because they are automatic.
I could, but I don’t operate within a time window. I like having my colored lights on when I’m gaming, but white when I’m working or cleaning, which could be after 5.
I could geofence them, but it’s difficult with a wife when we have different schedules. Don’t wanna be changing each other’s lights. Haha
I was more being rhetorical and speaking to how my lights are set up :)
I can confirm. I don’t want technology in my house I don’t have full control over. All these “smart devices” that run through smartphone apps in the cloud can fuck themselves. The amount of access most people give these corporations into their lives is insane to me.
Agree. That’s why I use ZigBee devices, they have their own offline network.
Softwares like Home Assistant are the only acceptable smart home solution.
I really like the data - to see how weather and my activity influences temperature, air quality, network… I can absolutely see, just in the temperature data, when I get out of bed; air quality shows when I cook, exercise, open windows. Nobody who’s not me needs that data, so all the sensors plug into an RPi or, at most, connect through zigbee/bluetooth. I can’t even imagine what They can infer from Smart TV or wifi refrigerator, and cameras can fuck right off.
But I can see where, if you like the data but can’t figure out how to manage it yourself, cloud devices could seem pretty attractive. Techno-magic and fun to be part of, and there’s so many people saying that privacy just doesn’t exist anymore. Probably people with an IoT security camera in their bedroom.
This post feels like more than just the privacy aspect. Every day I read about some connected devices going brick because they are no longer supported. Shit, my Roku 4 went brick because they need me to buy a Roku HD, and I suckered up. What’re you going to do when your doors won’t open because some company decides they don’t want to support them, or worse they go under? I am not IT, but why would I want to come home from a day of answering tickets and have to reprogram some proprietary hardware so I can make dinner?
thats why the F in FOSS means free as in freedom
Even worse than your doors getting stuck closed: your vision disappears.
I’m reading Radicalized by Cory Doctorow and the first story haunts me most. (Although I have 1 more to go) He has warned against the IoT Torment Nexus which means “they” are already creating it.
Our refrigerator is over 20 years old. It’s now obsolete according to the manufacturer. They recommend replacement over repair. I dread the day we can’t bring it back from the dead.
What’re you going to do when your doors won’t open because some company decides they don’t want to
Do not worry my friend. On that day day it will already have been decided that you are only licensing the ability to do so. They will put you in jail for opening your own door, and you’ll have given them the legal right to do so in the EULA.
I know some software engineers like that. Some of it is knowing that the companies that make iot devices don’t give a crap about security. Some of it is plain ol paranoia. Mechanical door locks can be picked does that mean you invest in guard dogs? Crime is a thing but so is misanthropy. I think we should take reasonable precautions but believe that there are more good ppl than bad.
Mechanical door locks can be picked, but it must be done at the lock in plain view rather than at a distance sitting in a car while you do the majority of the work and then casually walking up and opening the door. Locks are more of an inconvenience than a deterrent, so it should be made as inconvenient as possible. Connecting them to the internet is the exact opposite of that.
But more realistically someone robbing your house is going to ring your doorbell to see if someone is home, then just walk around checking for unlocked windows.
True, but again it’s about making it as inconvenient as possible. Manually locking windows and making sure they are locked is effective. In some places they put security bars on the windows. Tall fences can also create obstacles as well.
You won’t stop everyone that wants to break in, but you can create enough trouble to keep out most people. Making it convenient for yourself by connecting everything to the internet just makes it convenient for everyone else too.
You can’t ever stop someone who really wants to get into your home. The best you can do is make your home look too tedious to bother with.
Or make your neighbor’s home more attractive. Try keeping the neighbor’s house key, neatly labelled & with alarm code, under your own doormat. Just in case.
Yes,but you don’t do yourself any favours by leaving the front door open.
locks keep people honest, and make thieves pick a house that’s less of a hassle.
Tall fences are usually privacy fences and they can make it really easy for a thief to spend a ton of time unseen in your backyard.
Usually, but not always. I’m thinking more of the bar fence with spikes at the top.
Is the fence going to have a gate, and is that gate going to be locked? If so, you better put a fence around it to be safe.
Bear theory.
My house doesn’t need to be impenetrable, it just needs to be more of a hassle to get into than yours.
Not even that. It just needs to look like more of a hassle.
They really just let anyone buy those signs that say you have security cameras or an angry dog.
Someone mentioned to me that those angry dog signs are a liability because if someone gets bit they can say you knew you had angry dog, so it’s best just to have a sign that says dog and doesn’t mention it’s mood
“Dog with sharp teeth”
Might dependsl on your jurisdiction. But I wouldn’t be worried they’d probably need to prove you had a duty of care to them which you acted outside of which resulted in injuries that could have been avoided by you acting with a reasonable level of care.
Also if you did have a duty of care to them and knowingly had a dangerous dog not warning someone of known dangers (the dog) might constitute a break of your duty of care.
Tldr: It depends, you get what you pay for get your advice from actual local lawyers not random people on the street or the internet (like me).
I think CGP Grey has a video about this concept. It’s not so much that a mechanic lock is better or more secure.
It’s more that it takes one person
$xseconds to break into one lock.That’s very different than allowing a million people the opportunity to break your digital lock millions of times.
It’s a different threat model.
An average house lock is pretty easy to pick. An average picker of locks could get through in minutes. Someone who trained for years could get through in a few seconds if they’re lucky. Someone using a pick gun, willing to risk damaging the lock, can often get through in seconds. But, each individual lock is different, so you never know how long it will take to get through. Taking any more than 10 seconds to get through a door looks suspicious, so it’s very risky to try to pick a lock if you’re not willing to take a chance at looking suspicious, even if you’re a master lock picker.
With electronic locks, if there’s an exploit for that lock and the person going up to the lock has access to it, they could get through instantly and not look at all suspicious. If there’s no exploit, the person is out of luck. The person trying to break in also doesn’t have to have any expertise. They just need access to the exploits. Also, because people are constantly trying to find exploits, there’s almost guaranteed to be a time when your lock is vulnerable. Making it worse, with an electronic lock, someone can inspect the lock one time, and then just wait for a vulnerability for that particular lock to be available.
And my smart lock alerts me when someone unlocks it. Sure it could be hacked, but it is more likely that someone will just kick the door open.
Picking locks takes skill, kicking down a door is higher risk of alerting someone or getting caught. Those both deter a lot of would-be criminals.
Whereas a hack creates a situation where criminals are going to target those devices – it’s “low risk”. Any opportunistic asshole with 2 brain cells can download the hack and go around trying doors until it works.
In a meeting with a (business) customer regarding security precautions, my coworker had a great suggestion: we buy a mountain in
SwitcherlandSwitzerland, build a bunker there for the servers and hire a private army for protection. The customer liked the idea…Is Switcherland on the Ethernet continent?
I knew it was a mistake to not to check dow it’s spelled
Dats chrazy
Bahnhof has a data centre in Stockholm like that - lots of ex-military bunkers around.
actually good mechanical door locks can only be picked by a handful of people in the world with special tools most of whom are locksmiths
the word “picked” does a lot of heavy lifting here.
Most professional thieves won’t care about damaging your lock. It’s called “breaking” and entering for a reason.
And if your door is super reinforced better hope your wall is too
Yeah but how many people looking for a smash and grab are going to bring tools to cut through a wall instead of just going next door or through the window?
And a properly secured network can’t be compromised by some amateur thief sitting in their car. Point was that foolproof security is a fantasy.
I think the real point is that mechanical locks don’t track when you leave and enter your home like electronic ones do. Not whether they are better or worse than mechanical.
Point is reducing attack surface by not having internet connected lock 🙄
A “hacker” breaking into your house is a fantasy. If some one wants in they are….breaking….into your house. Ie breaking your door or window. Mechanical or not doesn’t make a difference. It’s all security theater. However you can know the status of internet connected locks at least.
I’m not just talking about locks. I’m talking about the concept of IoT itself.
And those locks cost hundreds a piece. A “there is a security system here” sign would do more useful work. And a locksmith will tell you that picking is what you try AFTER you just try bypassing the lock entirely. Aka shim the door or break a window. Exactly what a burglar will do if they really wanted in. You do know that your garage door can be disabled with a coathanger threaded inside and grabbing the release hook, right? Or a jack wedged under with a crowbar, right? Or your decorative gnome in the front yard thrown through a window? Locks are a deterrent.
But if my printer ever laughs at my bad jokes I’m keeping my hammer ready, just in case.
Locks can be picked, but good locks require picking skills far beyond what the average break and entry will have. They can be drilled, but that’s loud and increases the odds of being caught.
A software vulnerability can be triggered silently and will look like you’re an expected guest.
They’ll likely just smash the window in the back yard though so it’s a moot point
It’s not just poor security that’s easily hackable, it’s mainly the unreliability and frustration of having to continue to work when you get home to fix your dam light switch because it doesn’t work because it got out of sync when the microwave is turned on. No thanks.
Wow. Now I can show it to old ladies who don’t know english and live near me when they will mention ДЭГ.
The idea of a smart home? Fck yeah. Having it connected to some elses computer (cloud), fck no!
Having a home server only accessible by tailscale vpn, smart vacuum cleaner connected to it, not exposed to the internet, oh boy i love it!
And: having it locked to the manufacturer('s software), fuck no! Brand does not participate in standardisation? Fuck no!
Im actually ok with having it on s.o. elses computer if this applies.
Oh also: App that flicks a switch cannot be run on potato based system that uses more than an LED would to run, fuck no!
I’ve had roomies that were in IT, and generally most things weren’t “smart” appliances. I think the fanciest thing they had was a plex server. We all know how insecure the IoT is.
I’ve also had non-IT roomies and yeah, they were putting up surveillance cameras and shit and being super-creepy with monitoring.
I once very, very quietly tried to wash a dish at 1am in the kitchen (and most roomies conclude I’m a ninja as I’m generally extremely quiet to anyone who isn’t hyper-aware of noises already), and my roommate charged out trying to find the water leak.
I realized later she had some sort of monitoring alert on the water heater that woke her up, and because the house was dark because I didn’t want to wake anyone up with lights so her cameras were dark too, she went into a panic instead of using her common sense. I’d accidentally evaded half her surveillance trying to be a considerate roomie while I washed something quietly in the dark and she lost her frickin’ mind.
The guy I rent a room from has an app on his garage door that alerts him every time it opens so now I have to answer for it every time I fucking do anything in the garage (which is the quickest way for me to go in and out of the house). It’s so annoying. I got home 15 minutes early the other day and had a text from him 5 minutes later asking if I got home early. Like… Yea, fuck off dude. I’m about to start going in and out via my window.
Yeah, same lady that freaked because the water heater kicked on at night also had that on her garage. She was absolutely monitoring coming and going by it.
I sometimes contemplate how easy it is for people to be stalker freaks and despair.
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Doesn’t make a difference. I still get the text/phone call. If I let it ring he’ll come ask me about it when he gets home. I think he just gets a rush from it because he’s got nothing interesting going on in his life and it makes him feel like he’s on top of something for once.
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He’s not doing it to harass me. I come and go as I please and they don’t complain. It’s literally just because of that stupid notification he gets on his phone and he fixates on it for some stupid old man reason. It’s just an annoyance I have to deal with so I’m venting on here. The rent situation is really cheap so I don’t want to rock the boat too much by complaining to them about shit they do that bothers me.
It doesn’t matter what he intends; what matters is the actual effect it has on you.
To an extent yea. But the benefits of renting from him far outweigh this one annoyance. I would be paying 500+ more every month for anyplace else I looked at. I just need to deal with it until I can save enough for a down payment on a house of my own.
Start throwing around phrases like “quiet enjoyment.”
He’s not as advanced as he thinks he is. I have the same setup for my garage but I also have a camera in the garage that shows who is in the garage.
I’m not going to give him any more ideas.
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Why are you entering/leaving the house through the garage? That seems odd to me.
The door in from the garage is closer to my room than the front door? Also I can avoid the kitchen/living area and not have a 10 minute conversation I don’t want to have if the people I rent from are home.
You must’ve felt like Batman lol
I use Home Assistant, but none of my “smart-things” is cloud-based, so it all runs locally. Which also makes it much faster and reliable.
I work in IT which is the reason: I self-host my smart home crap with strict firewall between it and my home assistant server.
Image Transcription: Social Media
🖖 Jochen Mader 🇪🇺
I work in IT, which is the reason our house has:
- mechanical locks
- mechanical windows
- routers using OpenWRT
- no smart home crap
- no Alexa/Google Assistant/…
- no internet connected thermostats
association-of-free-people
🤔
elpatron56
Tech Enthusiasts: Everything in my house is wired to the Internet of Things! I control it all from my smartphone! My smart-house is bluetooth enabled and I can give it voice commands via alexa! I love the future!
Programmers/Engineers: The most recent piece of technology I own is a printer from 2004 and I keep a loaded gun ready to shoot it if it ever makes an unexpected noise.
firstdegreeliberty
Best part though?
Security technicians: *takes a deep swig of whiskey* I wish I had been born in the neolithic.
Good human
Thanks :3. I think its the first transcription I’ve done on Lemmy.
legend
as engineer with almost 6 years of experience: 90% of people in general don’t give a damn, persoanlly I’m like that
Been in IT for 18 years. I have smart home stuff because i got tired of sitting down on the couch with my beer, que poped for my game and then realizing i forgot to turn off the kitchen light. So yup, smart house, cameras, locks etc because it’s fun. Can someone hack my house? Sure, but they could just as easily put a brick through the window and come in. A lot more people are qualified to do that than hack my voice controlled lights.
As long as everything is local and doesn’t rely on the cloud it’s generally fine. Hell, I’m making my own voice assistant so it doesn’t need the cloud
Imagine making your own protocol for smart house before it was mainstream.
Lemmy in general has a hard-on for google/windows/non-Foss hate and extreme privacy :) Double edged sword imo, it’s probably what makes lemmy great, but the whole shtick also becomes old fast :)
Personally I’ll stick to my Google assistance, windows gaming pc and limited privacy (anonimity to a reasonable degree, almost no pictures of myself or my family on public social media).
Life is quite stress-free that way tbh :)
it’s probably what makes lemmy great, but the whole shtick also becomes old fast :)
It’s also what will make lemmy fail. Average users are pretty much bullied away back to Reddit. If you want Reddit to fail, you can’t make the alternative a shittier more toxic place to be. Lemmy currently has ~30K active monthly users and dropping steadily.
Personally with that number dropping, I don’t see many instances staying up, as it’s not free to operate, and app developers will surely dwindle.
Lemmy is absolutely not a welcoming place if you are interested in anything other than public transit, linux, or FOSS. Lemmy will end up like VOAT. Lemmy may not be filled with child porn, fat hate, and trans hate like VOAT was, but Lemmy is definitely filled with extremists.
Yeah my accounts keep getting banned from major communities for not being violently communist enough. It’s a pretty off-putting to see people saying that all Jews should be murdered and dragged through the streets and then getting banned for saying I don’t even understand what that has to do with socialism.
Similar. I take what I consider to be reasonable precautions… I have smarthome stuff but I stick with standards that work locally, or if I must look elsewhere then I aim for FOSS and/or reputable companies. I avoid social media, and avoid putting much of my Identity online.
Other than that… I dunno, we already live in the privacy post-apocalypse. It’s unavoidable, someone is recording you in every store, some friend will inevitably post some picture of you on Facebook, you’re going to have to deal with people who prefer WhatsApp over Signal or whatever. Just enjoy it and don’t stress.
It’s not what makes Lemmy great. It’s paranoid Luddite nonsense. I mean if people want to live like that fine, but as an engineer with a properly secured home network I think it’s obnoxious.
Not saying I’m a fan of that exact behaviour, but a lot of the tech behind the scenes is driven by passionate Foss ppl :)
I often roll my eyes when I see fear and doom mongering about privacy, but hey, the other side of the coin is equally annoying (people over sharing every single thing they do online :))
I like that my dishwasher tells me when it’s done via app, and I can’t live without my robot vacuum cleaner.
Still, they’re on a separate vlan so if they get infected, the malware will look around like the John Travolta meme.
Keeping internet of shit devices on separate vlan is a good practice, but the apps on your phone still gather your data.
For the robot vacuum, when it brakes, you can look into valetudo supported models. It’s a firmware hack that kills the cloud component and exposes it through a local http server, works very well. As for the dishwasher you could probably use a localy controlled smart socket with power monitoring to send a notification via home assistant when the power draw goes below certain threshold. Either zigbee/z-wave socket if you have other smart devices on these protocols, or a wifi tasmota device can work.
This may be a bit too far for some, but I believe we should keep our data safe, and if this is what it takes, then I am doing it.
valetudo
oh that’s great, never heard of it before. Thank you for throwing me into another rabbit hole! :)
I’ve been in tech my whole life, first in IT, now I’m a software developer and educated as an engineer. I have an IoT setup because it makes life easier, the security stuff also is a big time deterrent for would-be thieves. I know the stuff isn’t super secure in itself but I don’t get the paranoia, you tote your phone around everywhere, what do you think that’s doing? Also, they only use your data to try to sell you shit, it’s nothing nefarious and if it ever becomes so, it’s time to dump everything and live in the woods.
For me, it’s mostly the principle of the thing. It is none of a company’s business what I do and where I go and what I buy, and the more smart devices you have, the more information they can gather.
You can’t stop it, but personally, I see no reason to make it easy for them.
Why can’t you stop it? LineageOS for your phone, Linux at home, cash at stores.
People can stop them, and it’s not actually that hard.
Having a phone with you at all times and refusing to use tech in your house is like getting a super size big mac but saying you’re healthy because you got a diet coke.
You can control what your phone does too, so there’s no need to give up on it all just because a phone is in your pocket.
As others have mentioned in this thread - AOSP roms like GrapheneOS and LineageOS can do the trick.
Who controls your home, you or a large multi national corporation? It’s not paranoia, if you run afoul of that corporation, in an account billing dispute or other minor thing they will not think twice about disabling your access to your house.
And if you destroy their property to get in your house? The police could very well arrest you, because it was you on video who broke into the house.
Wait… How do you access your home?
A mechanical lock…
I was obviously asking how do you (the same generic “you” that you were using) get into your home that you need some third party’s permission to do so, as you implied in your comment.
Was it meant as a rhetorical question? Obviously the parent poster’s scenario was that you have to click a button in an app to unlock your doors.
Was there a point you were trying to make? I feel like I’m missing the obvious in this thread…
Does suck a product even exist? A front door smart lock that doesn’t have a mechanical key in case batteries die? And if it exists, I have two questions: 1. why in hell; and 2. who in their right mind would install it on their front door. That was the intent of my question.
Does such a product exist? I would hope not, but probably. There are certainly stupider things on the market.
But even with an emergency key, think about security alarms. You open the door, you have to put in the code to turn off the alarm – but you can’t, the code has been changed. You call the alarm company to say “No, it’s me” but your account has been frozen, so they still send the police.
Yeah, it’s a little over-the-line dystopian, but instead of being 100% bonkers out of a movie, it’s more “…yeah, I can see how that could happen if you have the Ring doorbell and Ring door lock and Ring alarm monitoring, and the company froze your account for some reason”
This is pretty much where I’m at. It’s too difficult to fully stop data collection without having to live off the grid, but I sure as shit will block every single ad on my devices. So really they can collect as much data as they want but I won’t let them use it to sell me their garbage.
I too have a monitored home security system: Ring, but with no Ring cameras. I’m completely fine with it as I’m paying someone to essentially “watch my house” for me. I’m not concerned they can see door, motion, and glass break sensors.
But every other IoT device in my house is limited to the local network and controlled through Home Assistant. Not only is it far more secure and eliminates the privacy issues – it’s a better experience. Everything is integrated, automated exactly the way I want them to be, and controlled through a single app I configured to suit me.
$5 a month for a VPS running a wireguard VPN server gets me a secure, reliable connection between the app and home server.
I’m an IT professional, specifically in infosec, and it’s silly to go to those extremes. I have tons of smart home devices, and they’re all perfectly secure since I run Home Assistant and block them from the internet with a firewall.
block them from the internet with a firewall.
Do they tell you in their manual what ports they work with, or is there a website that will let you know based on a product?
The good thing is that you don’t need to know which ports to block. You just set your firewall up to deny by default and then start whitelisting the things you want to allow.
Even easier if you put your “smart” devices in a separate network, then it’s just:
- Allow traffic from home net to Internet
- allow traffic from home net to iot-net
- drop the rest
Now you can surf the internet, control your devices and they can’t phone home
There are a lot of things that won’t play by those rules. A roomba will tell you to f right off without internet access. You have to pick and choose your hardware or make concessions to what can access the outside.
You can isolate devices without having to figure out which ports they use.
