BETTER LIVING THROUGH SMARTER TECHNOLOGY
HOME LIFE
STAY SPY–FREE
TAKE YOUR SMART HOME OFFLINE
Can you cut the cord on your smart devices and
control your smart home privately?BY ALEX COXeader Colin Robertson recently
contacted us with a concern about
connectivity and oversharing. “It feels
more and more like an adversarial
relationship between consumers and the
companies who want to spy on — I mean, serve
us,” he writes. “I’m interested in the convenience
of video doorbells and thermostats, but all of these
solutions involve companies that want to access
your data for themselves via the cloud.”
Is removing that a realistic ideal? Those who
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the way the local smart home once operated, and
that’s not something we’re looking to revisit. While
it was a more private way to do things, it was plentyclunky; switches and relays forced to carry massive
antennae, only the most simplistic operations
available, limited central processing that forced you
to keep a noisy computer running at all times — it
was the convenience and power of the smartphone
and the cloud that pulled smart devices out of the
doldrums and made them mean something.GO LOCAL
So is it possible to run a local, or at least private,
smart home without losing those modern
conveniences? We immediately run into a few big
problems with data (see Data gone wild, page 72)
and with the core nature of smart home devices:
many, if not most of them, are tied inexorably to
the cloud. Control passes almost immediately from
a typical smart device to a server online, where it’s
acted upon and a message is bounced back to, say,
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tell it to switch on or change a parameter.
More complex kit relies on much of its smart
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camera that can recognize faces, for example, likely
won’t have the capability built into its hardware
— the face is actually recognized in a server farm,
because it’s a computationally expensive task.
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processing in–house. That means dropping most
wireless smart devices — a proper power supply
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Image rights: Home Assistant.
Home Life
70 APR 2020 maclife.com
Home Assistant gives you extendable, fine–tuned smart home
control, though it can be a little obtuse.