I think the proposition of death is a bit of a stretch. Definitely inconvenient, though.
FWIW, dumb appliances could have done the same thing.
A furnace that stops working in the dead of winter while away can still burst your pipes if they get cold enough, a broken appliance (and an operator unwillingly to change the situation) can still cause someone to freeze the death or suffer from a deadly heatstroke.
This particular issue cited first probably has mostly to do with the fact that nest really wants you to have a 24V power source for the thermostat (A "C" or "Common Wire"). They've figured out how to make it work without for most systems, but that relies on an internal battery.
Re:Smart homes and vegetable peelers
by 2muchcoffeeman on Tuesday February 06, 2018 @01:02PM
(#16318025)
Sure, there are still other failure modes for a furnace and you can still freeze to death without a Nest. But now you can encounter similar situations because of a software bug.
Wasn’t that C wire issue causing Nests to continuously turn on the furnace causing homes to get too hot?
None of these things will kill you if they happen not to work or have serious drawbacks.
Software update to Nest could have literally killed people and caused thousands of dollars of property damage. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/14/fashion/nest-thermostat-g...
Or maybe everything you say is being recorded and sent to Google all the time. http://bgr.com/2017/10/11/google-home-mini-spying-on-user-fi...
I'll stick with my dumb appliances thanks.