Hey y’all, I’m wondering what (if any) privacy-respecting Smart Home products there are. I understand that “smart” things are inherently privacy invasive, but I’d imagine some are worse than others. Surely Amazon Alexa isn’t the best, right?
I’m really not looking for anything special, just a company with some basic smart items (bulbs and outlets mostly) and a mobile app that doesn’t suck and doesn’t ask to read my text messages to dim the lights.
TIA and please LMK if this isnt the right forum for this question.
This is an interesting problem, for sure. Sticking with open source/open platforms and staying away from closed ecosystems is a good direction to start in.
If a product line requires its own hub and proprietary software, try and steer clear of it. Hue lights are an interesting example as, IMHO, their smart lights are some of the best on the market. However, you are tied into using their apps and hub to get 100% functionality. (Much of their API is accessible via third parties and the balance of open vs closed is tolerable enough for me.)
Home Assistant is probably going to be your best start as control software. This will naturally push you in the direction of getting hardware that is usually open source and designed with Home Assistant in mind. (There are still privacy drawbacks to HA in some cases, but that is very use case specific.) Since HA is open source, developers tend to rely more on open source hardware.
If you must integrate with closed(ish) ecosystems like Samsung, Amazon or Google, never use their hub or software as a primary management system. What I mean is that you can use their hub to relay commands from HA, but turn off, disable or misconfigure features that are platform specific and you may never need. (The goal is identity places where a big provider would harvest data and not give it data to harvest from your HA system while also attempting to reduce failure conditions that might be introduced by having multiple, “primary” control systems.)
I am sorry for generalizing most of this when you asked a very specific question, but home automation is very much a “build your own adventure” kind of situation. Especially on the open source and privacy-awareness side of it, you are going to need to dig in and research each product you are interested in.
Start learning communication protocols, hardware types and how to read source code now, btw. Home automation is an excellent way to jump into the deep end of hardware + software development.
Edit: My lessons learned:
Open source products/projects may not stay open source or may have open functionality reduced. Samsung SmartThings has been a rollercoaster in this regard. Chamberlain is an example where they cut off their open API completely. Open products that convert to closed should be regarded as a privacy threat: When a product is monetized, so is your data.
Stay away from fly-by-night products on Amazon. Super cheap products from rando brands that leverage usually custom phone apps tend to get abandoned and may have critical bugs that are never resolved and may end up only being useful as botnet endpoints. (Shit IoT products can be nasty security threats as they tend to be placed inside private networks.)
Study new products and vendors you plan on adding to your network. Setting up your own DNS server and transparent proxy to record all Internet calls for a couple of weeks is a good option. Learn those products from the inside out: What chipsets do they use? Is their firmware open and regularly updated? What is the community reputation? Etc, etc.
Home automation is a “long game” hobby. Sure, you can setup something that works over the course of a few weeks, but plan on slow changes over years. From a privacy perspective, see item 1 as software tends to morph over time.