The product is basically a cloud-enabled garage door remote. It doesn't replace the buttons on the wall in the garage, nor does it replace the garage door opener you use in your car, or however it is you work your door. It supplements them, like buying a spare remote, except this one is app-enabled and can be used without line-of-sight to the door.

I have a smart garage door opener, smart deadbolt, smart car (remote start/heat/cool/etc), smart thermostat, smart light fixtures, smart smoke detector... all of them function without internet, or power, as applicable. Light switches, buttons, keys, etc still work. Most smart devices are like that; the remote functionality is supplemental, not a replacement.

It is not that simple. Do you remember one of those bear toys that were sending the recordings of their conversations with children to an exposed MongoDB instance? I bought one of them for my daughter a few months before. And I am a software engineer who knows what an exposed MongoDB instance is. My voice and my daughter's voice are now in the leak. Thankfully, the toy was only used with my supervision, so I know what was said there.

The problem is that is was advertised as a Bluetooth-powered toy to communicate with your child via recorder messages. "It's fun" -- I have thought, so I bought it. Only later I realized that it forwarded everything that was said to their servers via their "cloud app".

OK, I have thought, so they have the recording. But at least do they have some decency to not share it with the public? And that, indeed, turned out to be a little naive.

The toy became "broken" a few weeks before the leak when I was finally fed with it, but the damage is done.

Now I have similar worries about my NetAtmo devices. They do look cool and measure CO2 content in my rooms, which is the reason I bought them, but they also contain an always-on microphone for measuring "noise pollution", and I am not sure at this point if they don't transmit everything I speak in my room to the CIA, NSA, Russians, our reptilian overlords, or whoever else needs to hear the shit I say at home.

There's a really easy solution to this. Don't buy junk you don't need sold by people who don't care. Who convinced you you needed it in the first place? That's probably a bigger source of noise pollution...

The "sold by people who don't care" is a bit of a problem. How do I know they care? I'm a software engineer, I'm much more technical than most people around me. I have a hard time picking my way through that - is that childs toy bluetooth or wifi, with whom does it communicate what, how do they handle the data that they may or may not gather. Is it using a secure protocol to do so? How am I going to explain that to my less technical friends that don't have my knowledge? How can I educate them or how can they self-educate to a point where they can make a conscious decision about which toy is trustworthy? Heck, Miele had their dishwasher hacked, generalize for all IoT devices.

I want (in fact, I need, because of my sensitivity to CO2 levels) a nicely working CO2 sensor in my room. I tried a few cheaper options, but they didn't work as reliably. I did my research, and it was either NetAtmo or some industrial-grade sensors, more expensive and ugly.

I love the idea that you have any concept at all about whether or not someone needs an item. We're all glad you aren't materialistic, but we don't really care about your opinions on other people's spending habits