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The Smart Home Wi-Fi Trap: Are We All Being Conned by Convenience? (unknownuniverse.uk)
submitted 1 month ago by to c/privacy@programming.dev
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Mainstream tech advice treats cheap Wi-Fi smart plugs as harmless convenience, totally glossing over how much telemetry leaks out to overseas cloud servers by default.

Expecting casual users to set up VLANs and firewall drop rules just to stop a £10 light bulb from phoning home is a bit of a joke.

True privacy means local control without corporate middlemen.

Original content by The Unknown Universe, written by a human and not AI generated!

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[–] 18 points 1 month ago (5 children)

Wifi is a bad protocol for smart home stuff for several reasons, and telemetry is only part of that.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 month ago (4 children)

    I wish I had started off with z-wave instead of WiFi.

    It's annoying that it's proprietary, but ZigBee operating on 2.4GHz is a deal breaker for me.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 month ago (3 children)

    Can't bad actors still affect ZWave? Asking out of genuine curiosity

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  • [–] 1 point 1 month ago

    One benefit of ZWave is that it operates on the 900MHz band instead of 2.4GHz, giving it both better range and penetration and avoiding interference from WiFi.

    The security benefit is that 99/100 times, connecting a device to WiFi also gives it internet access. The user has to manually intervene and block this ability, the device has internet by default. This is simply not the case for a ZWave device. For those to connect to the internet and to malicious domains, you would need to be able to access the ZWave coordinator with a compromised device. It adds a whole new necessary link to the chain.

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    • [–] 3 points 1 month ago

    The amount of work I've had to put in to claw back a modicum of privacy from the relatively small number of smart things in my house is absurd. 100% agree that there's no way a casual user would know where to start.

    But the older I get, the less interest I have in smart things. Thermostat, air filters, the snow melting cables and that's about it. Why do I need a light show to announce my arrival or set the mood to watch a movie... I can click the light switch.

    I'm sure there are plenty of accessibility use cases for it, but I feel the most of it is just a gimmick.

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