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?
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.