Most thermostats are literally just digital thermometers that control a relay that turns the furnace/ac on and off.
A simple arduino (or much cheaper IC) can easily do the same thing if you wire it in.
And then on the software side... there's several large, open-source projects that exist in this space and provide nice api tooling for interacting with those devices. Things like:
OpenHab: https://www.openhab.org/
HomeAssistant: https://www.home-assistant.io/
HomeBridge: https://homebridge.io/
etc...
Even Alexa has basically drop-in self hosted alternatives like Mycroft: https://mycroft.ai/ or ADA/Almomd (now Genie) https://genie.stanford.edu/
It's not only true - I strongly suspect you can do it for much less than 50 bucks if you don't need the physical thermostat to have buttons/screens.
Thus, I should only be okay with it if I’m okay with the “nothing to hide” argument, which I’m not.
Additionally, we, the consumers, have lost the right to own things. Or at least, if we do own things, it comes with all sorts of strings attached in the form of "features" or "connectivity". Which is just marketing lingo to say that you're feeding the cash cow.
Note that I don't think anyone should be forced into this sort of surveilance. It should always be a choice. I also support the open source projects to bring it back to individual control - it's just too much hassle for me, personally.
they've got you right where they want you.
The benefits of the producer measures in dollars.
However you balance it, the producer wins. By many orders of magnitude.
And since were talking about privacy and personal data, the more consumers there are, the more the producers improve their margin on each and all consumers.
Also, I would argue that receiving money does not mean the producer wins, since ultimately the producer is also a consumer, and who will thus be spending those dollars on the same things as every other consumer… comfort and status, as you put it.
The tech is there so someone could make a box with no external data transferred that could store and analyze video data. I would be a customer for sure for something that had this capability without the privacy concerns.
Google and Amazon say they want this data for quality control, but I suspect each of them have plans (if not active projects) for converting video inside people's homes into actionable marketing data.
I suspect not. Besides the fact that it’s a whole new level of creepy and that alone is a PR mess, I doubt it’s that useful. Sure a camera in your home sounds perfectly useful for marketing but whose camera is positioned like that. Mine is aimed at the entryway door. The best you can get from that is presence. I suspect that’s true for most peoples home.
Beyond the question of actually data quality, data processing would have to be very expensive. You couldn’t run those models locally (because the object detection would be too complex and changing) so you’d need to stream to cloud. That would instantly be the largest and most expensive streaming platform ever, dwarfing YouTube or Netflix or anything. Not to mention the actual ML components of it.
I suspect smarthome companies don’t want the data and begrudgingly accept that some cloud is needed because people are notoriously bad at protecting backups (and remote monitoring is a convenient feature).
I question if the incremental increase in marketing revenue would exceed the technical costs.
Do Uyghurs have something to hide and are worth spying on? How many times are we going to hear this argument? It comes only from a position of privilege. You're only uninteresting to be spied on as long as it's allowed by the security apparatus you depend upon. There's a reason we have sayings like "power corrupts"; dismissing the potential for abuse of a cloud-based unencrypted surveillance system is narrow-mindedness at best and subversion at worst.
Note: the above hardly represents me politically, it is just a counterargument against the perennially repeated "I have nothing to hide."
It's definitely a privilege to be the majority ethnicity and sexuality in a modern western liberal democracy, but it is what it is. The chances of the British government suddenly turning against white straight apolitical irreligious men are just so low it's not something I worry about.
What I worry about more are things like people breaking into my house, my dog chewing up the carpet and forgetting where I left my glasses.
I do hope that we can figure out a way to package all the privacy violating cloud-based services in a way that's simple to use, encrypted, local only, etc. though so perhaps more subversive people can enjoy these systems without worrying about oppression.
To be quite honest, the most privacy sensitive things in my life are probably my emails and documents, but those are all already in Google Drive and Gmail anyway, along with basically everyone else's. All anyone will get from my cameras is a stream of me feeding my rabbits, browsing tiktok and scratching my arse. GCHQ are welcome to tune in any day, provided they also help me pick out my clothes in the morning.
FYI: I have zero Alexa/Siri enabled device, zero automated home device, a degoogled phone, etc etc. So we might have different perspectives on the matter.