this post was submitted on 25 Nov 2023
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Home Automation
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Home automation is the residential extension of building automation.
It is automation of the home, housework or household activity.
Home automation may include centralized control of lighting, HVAC (heating, ventilation and air conditioning), appliances, security locks of gates and doors and other systems, to provide improved convenience, comfort, energy efficiency and security.
Warning: Working with electricity can result in injury, property damage, or even death if it is not done properly. Please keep this in mind while assisting others. If you are not sure about what you are doing, hire a licensed professional.
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Right. I would never use a corporate data collection device in any of my systems. I have never plugged in a Google home or Alexa device in my house and I never will. That people are not only enthusiastically willing to use these products, but also oblivious or unconcerned with their every conversation or voice prompt being recorded and mined is absolutely bewildering to me.
I know some people like the whole voice command thing but I'm cool to do a little more upfront to make my systems just be smart enough to know when I need X, Y, or Z to happen.
Set up a network gateway once and wiresharked it. Echos don't transmit anything that is said when the blue light isn't on. You're right that the voice prompts are being data mined to hell and back, but your day to day conversations aren't.
Where I find particular concern isn't the data molining of conversations, but rather the fact that any cloud connected device can serve to update whoever they decide what your home's current WAN IP address is, which can be used along with cookies or apps on your phone to tell when it has joined a particular wifi network, thereby knowing who is in what house when. Oh, Jill spends a lot of time in the same house as Bob, but only stays over night half the week? Oh, Jill is doing a lot of searches for stuff pregnant women search for? Better start flooding Bob with ads for engagement rings!
Something that's relatively easy for an advertising giant like Google to do is add an audio signature to video advertisements to get a sense of when ads are being viewed. The resulting data (probably a uuid and timestamp) would be small and could go with the next prompt or perhaps firmware update.
I definitely agree the concern about every conversation being uploaded is nonsense though. It's too much data for them to store and process locally and wait for a window to upload in discreetly.
I'm legit surprised more isn't being done with ultrasonics/infrasonics in the exact areas you describe.
There was one project I worked on to help spec-out and design a device location system at a hospital and one of the solutions we vetted actually used low power ultrasonic exciters producing known and unique patterns paired with tiny little microphone equipped pucks with just enough smarts to record the relative volumes of multiple exciters and send that via radio to a central server along with its own unique ID to be used for triangulation. Ended up being too expensive for us and we went with something based on a combination of BLE and LoRA, but holy shit was the sound based stuff cool (and wouldn't crowd the radio environment nearly so much, which can be a big deal in ultra dense environments like a hospital.)
Thanks for your input. These are very valid points.