Not just that, you also have to install a proprietary piece of software onto the phone from a third party and accept their TOS.

> can provide other people with a pseudo-legitimate access to it

I think in the news story the smart locks were only installed on the front door not on the doors to the homes. If the landlord installed them on the doors for the homes as well, that would be very troubling indeed.

Money quote.

People aren't thinking ahead here about what this opens you up to with respect to privacy loss. Think about the permissions on your phone such an app could ask for in the future. Now consider that if you don't grant them, you could potentially not get into your apartment.

Smart locks are a cancer. We should cut them out early.

Forget the future: the TOS currently permit the collection of personal information for marketing, to which the company blandly responded, "we don't do that".

Baby with bathwater. Smart locks are useful. Bad implementations are bad. You can have one with both a normal key lock and a card which uses a standard RFID tag rather than a specific app. They're both convenient and failsafe.

> Not just that, you also have to install a proprietary piece of software onto the phone from a third party and accept their TOS.

Also, the lock has to be charged at all times... is that the landlord's responsibility?

A burglar's dream.

Fail open and get your stuff jacked? Or fail closed and have to ingress/egress via the window (or worse)?

I can imagine smart locks with no secondary opening mechanism being installed in my old dormitories at school. People already locked each other in with the penny jamming trick. Imagine if you could do that either by disrupting the power supply or setting up a cell/wifi jammer?

When you say “The smart lock,” are you referring to the one in this story? The article mentions that this smart lock, which led to a common area, had a keypad:

“Lisa Gallaudet, the landlords' attorney, said the smart lock was on a single door and that tenants were able to enter a numeric code to get in and didn't need an app. They'd also been offered codes they could enter without a phone.”

So a few things here.

(1) This system did not provide access to a tenant’s apartment directly, only a common area, probably a hallway or entry to the apartment area (article mentions tenant was trapped without it)

(2) The claim that a 93 year old lacked the dexterity to operate the smart lock is spurious. A physical key requires more dexterity than pushing numbers on a keypad.

Overall, this does not seem like a resounding victory for tenants everywhere. More like, a technical win that would support future action by tenants if they find themselves faced with a mandatory-smart-lock-on-their-actual-door situation, which this is not.

In this case absolutely not. I've used the lock in question. It does not have physical keys, and the keypad is non-responsive, and round in shape (think rotary phone). Every person I know who has used the keypad has had trouble both on their first and succeeding attempts. I am pretty good with it, but it requires typing very slowly and using my thumb in order to ensure the key press is accepted.

I used to live in a place with a main door that was a smart lock and I loved it, now I have to carry keys again which is super annoying.

But one time the battery died while the landlord was out of town, which meant I couldn’t get in my building for hours until his friend was able to find and bring over the physical key backup.

Why not get your phone charged somewhere? Neighbors, a shop, ... surely someone could lend you an outlet + charger for 30 mins?

Anyway the unit in question took 4 AA batteries which needed to be replaced every 6 months or so. The batteries of the lock itself died earlier than expected. Apparently the wifi connection to the front building door was bad and that caused the battery life to drain significantly faster than advertised.

You might want to account for the lifestyle impact of switching from physical keys to stuff you have to memorize.

I suspect there is a certain amount of muscle memory involved in using keys. I don't even think "which key do I need" when locking/unlocking my doors, my hands automatically select the correct key.

There are adapters and grips designed for people with arthritis.

A hidden camera watching someone entering a code is not as secure as placing a key in a hole.

This does not look like a privacy win to me. It looks like a good precedent that will aid in a privacy court battle in the future.

"It's not clear to me that this is true" is different from "this is false".

(Also note that the only evidence in the article even for the existence of the code, let alone the question of whether or not it identifies the tenant, is an attorney's claim; in the article, it is not denied, but nor does anyone else confirm it. For example, the attorney's claim is perfectly consistent with the possibility that there is a code, but that the landlord did not inform tenants of it, or would not provide it to them.)

> This does not look like a privacy win to me. It looks like a good precedent that will aid in a privacy court battle in the future.

But the article says:

> It won't set a legal precedent because it's a settlement, but it represents a win for tenants who had issues with smart locks and landlords installing them against their will.

I have a dumb phone and mainly leave that at home. Anybody who wants me can leave a message and wait for a callback. Seems to work well for past 20 years.

I don't have a fancy one for the very reasons of tracking, loss of privacy/data collection and above all for this type of use, and what the parent didn't mention, I do not trust tech even slightly, being a tech guy myself.

If you rely on power and intelligence, other than manpower and brainpower, to unlock a door, then you're a bloody fool.

(NB cost of a spare key ~£5).

  (NB cost of a spare key ~£5).

With most keys you can't waltz into Mister Minit and have them pull a copy.

How are they going to even know?

> ...you can't waltz into...

I've never come across a key that couldn't be duplicated with a quick £5 waltz. IME only I suppose.

Only the entity ordring the locks is authorized to have additional keys made. And it's pretty heavily enforced by the manufacturers and distibuters.

Copies are also more than 5 quid.

[1] https://www.dormakaba.com/hr-hr/proizvodi/proizvodi/mechanic...

[2] https://www.assaabloy.ch/en/local/switzerland/landingpage/as...

Edited to add : While the web pages talk pretty much about smart locks, both manufacturers offer purely mechanical locks (or hybrids), which cannot be copied easily.

as long as you give back two copies of the key by the end of the lease, landlords usually don't care.

Because it's a non-standard key with print on it: "Property of X, not to be copied without permission" and because it's a non-standard key, to even get the blanks requires knowing whom to ask for permission to make copies.

Think something like US Post Office box keys, or bank safe deposit keys.

Not even that. The keys I was referring to have serial numbers and the blanks are strictly controlled.

Only the owner of said serial numbers (usually represented by a card) can order copies directly from the manufacturer or their designated agents.

Normal key copy shops wouldn't even have the blanks to furnish copies.

I don't think that it's totally impossible to copy such keys and it will be probably even be harder to prevent copys in the future (think 3d printing). But you can't have them copied by any old shoe maker with a key copy side business.

I just found "normal" blanks with the same cross section, whipped up the tooth profile and a holding fixture in some pirated CAD program and took a thumb drive and the blanks down to the machine shop during lab hours.

Also some "secure" keys don't have any blanks. Most shops don't have the ability to duplicate them. You can still get them copied, but you need a skilled machinist at considerably more cost.

I remember a story recently about a secure luggage key. And every luggage lock was supposed to use it, but you weren't supposed to be able to get copies. But then a newspaper article printed a full-page image of the key, so... yeah, it got duplicated on a 3D printer that day: https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2015/09/11/tsa-master-lugga...

This is not widely known, and virtually every rental contract says otherwise. But those terms are unenforceable.

For the record, I learned this from a lawyer living in New York as an example of why many landlords choose not to rent to lawyers.

It turns out that while discriminating on the basis of race and religion is illegal, it is perfectly legal to discriminate on the basis of profession. As a result it can be challenging for lawyers to find a place to live.

>NYC

I see no contradiction between your logic and "it's hard for a lawyer to rent in NYC" :)

I can't speak for America or NY, but Switzerland has exactly the same tenancy law.

The landlord must announce a visit to the appartment like 48 hours in advance an he cannot abuse the privilege. Essentially you "own" the rented appartment during your tennancy.

Emergencies (i.e. a burts pipe) is different, of course.

Even in NY though, landlords are allowed to request a key to enter the apartment non-destructively for emergencies or legally notified work. Its common practice here to add an additional interior deadbolt to your apartment front door, so the landlord (or building supervisor) will have one copy of the key for the main lock which any prior tenant could have also had, and you'll provide them a spare key for the interior addon deadbolt you added yourself. The standard lease also explicitly allows using a door chain/slider to prevent even keyed entry wile you are present in the home.

Many other states have no such requirement at all, or allow landlords to place much more limiting language they want into lease riders.

Read up after having a pretty scarring experience about two years ago. I like to take long showers to relax. One day I took a longer than usual shower and just so happened to be rubbing one out. Landlord busted into the bathroom mid rub out saying the water was running too long. I flipped a shit, read up on the laws afterward (previously skimmed them over and had a sense it was/is illegal), wrote a long letter hinting at taking legal action/very real what if scenarios (gf showering,etc). Rent hasn't increased since, beyond nice whenever we see each other, has even invited me to watch the soccer game with him a couple times after dropping off rent...

Regardless, what he did was fucked/illegal, and I was beyond embarrassed, though now I laugh about it when thinking back or a buddy brings it up

Possession vs Ownership. In some countries, there law makes a difference and in some like Switzerland and Germany, for example, the possession of an object (or apartment) gives you a number of rights that the landlord can't annihilate by adding more words to a contract.

While in germany the landlord is the owner of the appartment, they have no right to enter it as they want, use it as they want or do anything but emergency work without the permission of whoever pays rent.

On the other hand, since the renter is not in ownership but mere possession of the apartment, they can´t do as they want either; they can't take down a wall even if it's cleared by an engineer to be safe, the landlord has to approve any permanent changes to their ownership unless the contract gives the renter some free reign.

Structural changes either need the landlord's approval or have to be reverted to how it was before you moved in.

This can obviously be rather expensive if you tore down a wall.

If there's an emergency, the fire services will kick the door.

Deposit? Haven't heard that name before.

So could be that parent is French.

The landlord claimed (about half way down the article) that there was some sort of code that could be entered to open the door with no phone. Is that not the case?

> Lisa Gallaudet, the landlords' attorney, said the smart lock was on a single door and that tenants were able to enter a numeric code to get in and didn't need an app. They'd also been offered codes they could enter without a phone.

Whether that's an alternative depends on the implementation. If it's a code unique to the tenant that goes through the same backend, then the same privacy argument applies. If it's a static code for any tenant, their whole argument falls apart. Either way, if true, bringing up the whole part about the elderly tenant not being able to operate a smartphone is just dishonest.

To clarify my position, I am not in favor of the app for privacy reasons, and prefer the physical lock and key. But it isn't clear to me how far the dexterity argument goes.

That doesn't seem too implausible to me. If you thrust your key at the lock but miss... you scratch the lock maybe. Not a big deal, you can retry. But if you thrust your finger at the keypad, you might miss and hit the wrong key. Okay, so try again right? Just the same as the physical lock.

Except the key only requires you to successfully align the key and the lock once. The keypad requires you to successfully align your finger and the correct key numerous times in a row. If you mess up the second or third key press, you have to start over from the beginning.

So yes, depending on the nature of the impairment, a physical key might very well be easier to use than a keypad.

Even then, it's not equivalent: a hidden wireless camera installed by a thief can easily see the code on the paper or key thing, or even typed into the pad.

And a key generally requires more dexterity to operate than a keypad. I think vision issues might be a valid complaint, since you can usually operate a key by feel; harder to do that with a keypad, especially in the dark.

Individual apartments still required a physical key to access.

This is not much different than my old apartment building that required a keyfob to enter the front door, but individual keys for the units.

Lisa Gallaudet, the landlords' attorney, said the smart lock was on a single door and that tenants were able to enter a numeric code to get in and didn't need an app. They'd also been offered codes they could enter without a phone

Forget manual dexterity, I'm 42 and I can't reliably assume my cellphone is charged, PARTICULARLY if I'm just getting home (the time it is most likely to be dead.

Comments below point out there is a bypass code, so my comment isn't so much about the in/justice as it is my inability to keep a charge.

I agree with the rest of your points, but I'm not sure that this is meaningfully different than them loaning out a copy of your key.