Submitted 1 year ago by Remontoire@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world
https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2023/09/22/philips-hue-force-users-upload-data-to-cloud/
cross-posted from: lemmy.world/post/5717757
Today’s story is about Philips Hue by Signify. They will soon start forcing accounts on all users and upload user data to their cloud. For now, Signify says you’ll still be able to control your Hue lights locally as you’re currently used to, but we don’t know if this may change in the future. The privacy policy allows them to store the data and share it with partners.
I’m struggling to understand the reasoning behind this. Like these are just lightbulbs right? What’s the value in that data that I’m not seeing
Location data, when you're home/not home, which room you're likely in/not in. Data that costs almost nothing to produce, but can be sold for millions.
Bulbs tell them when you're in the kitchen, bathroom, bedroom, etc. Relatively easy to combine it with smart tv, smart watch and app/phone data to identify you exactly. Tv went on at 6:53:20, light went on at same time, GPS location, Wifi data.
Combine it all and it's likely they'd be able to identify you exactly and identify what you're doing with a high degree of certainty, then micro-target you with ads or propaganda.
Honestly, there comes a point where you'd have more privacy shoving a camera up your ass.
A lot of people don’t seem to understand that each individual but of data is often not valuable in itself, but it is as part of a whole.
Basically, everything there is to know about you is a jigsaw puzzle. Many companies out there want that finished piece, so they pay a premium for each individual piece of the jigsaw, and the companies you give your data to everyday are selling those pieces.
As an added bonus, anything with unnecessary wireless functionality can easily be hacked, controlled and monitored by anyone savvy enough
Intelligence / espionage agents will have a field day with this kind of info.
Likely they want detailed user data and what devices you use, and they want to cross reference that with geolocation so they can upsell you stuff.
I would say it’s likely they’ll start serving ads in the app and “recommending” you other services or things like a subscription. Any app that you have to look at will get ads these days, just look at Uber.
This is why I bought IKEA bulbs that are dumb. I avoid anything that uses an app, because it will update itself to make a new thing sell better.
…are you serious?
There would be so much data in understanding people’s light usage. For example, you could figure out how late or early people get up, number of people living in a house, how crowded the house is, how many lights are used per room, etc etc. it would be a gold mine of information.
Let’s say you’re a home automaton designer. You want to design devices to be used in the home, but in order to design such devices, you need enough of a stockpile of user data. This lightbulb data would be incredible valuable.
You can probably even analyse the data and determine things like whether someone is watching tv late at night.
also, room names. You can get a pretty good idea of a house's interior layout from the names and sequence of lights being activated. The ongoing attempts to map data to the physical world.
Sonos did this a few years ago and there was a similar outcry. I have stopped using Sonos devices too.
Considering a lot of people are home all the time, probably not worth all that much.
I think people overestimate how much their behavior and data is actually worth. Companies only care as far as targeting ads to people. But 95% of the time those ads don’t actually do anything anyways.
You don’t need the individual light bulb data for that, just the user accounts and device IDs would tell you who lives in the house, their relationships, and you can use the IP from the app’s analytics eventing to approximate location to estimate household wealth.
The lightbulb data sounds fun, but not valuable.
How does a randomized system mess with that data. I only have two hue light, an under cabinet strip. My Echo turns them on and off randomly when I set it in the away mode. Will Phillips get both sets of data? Will Daddy Jeff share? Will he just buy Phillips and cut out the middle man?
I can think of a few companies / products that would love to know that you’re in the bathroom every couple hours, for instance.
Or even anonymised, a company or study might want to buy “average Nova Scotian time spent in living room on weekends”
Big data is worth big $$$
They’re light bulbs, they emit light, it’s literally what you’re seeing
sorry, alphabet bought humor last month.
Friends don’t let friends use the cloud enshittified internet services. Stop signing up for subscription services for things that should never have a subscription. Stop giving companies your data. Even if they aren’t screwing you over today, they will tomorrow. It happens so often it’s just background noise on the news anymore. Just say no to putting your shit on the cloud other people’s computers.
the cloudother people’s computers
I like that
Just say no to putting your shit on the cloud other people’s computers.
Unfortunately self-hosting is not a realistic solution for the vast majority of the population. Even the best solutions out there for self-hosting are way too complex for most people. If it’s not close to “point-click-done”, with no debugging or maintenance whatsoever, it’s just not a viable solution for most people. I’m decent with tech and do self-host a few things, but it’s a complete PITA compared to “cloud” options.
I don’t use the cloud and I also don’t self host.
Occasionally I have to put up with a minor inconvenience like putting a file on a USB stick and carry that physical USB stick with me. The horrific inconvenience! How do I survive
Thats way we have to organize us in groups running strong homeserver behind VPN and proxy running all kinds of FOSS web services and federate those services with other groups.
A tech-noob should trust his local Sysadmin, not some (foreign) company
You don’t understand, your lights need to track you, how else are they going to improve your user experience? Using lights is so complicated that it requires them to train AI models to better understand the necessities of users. The methods that have worked for hundreds of years cannot work with today’s users
I’m pretty sure basic usage statistics were updloaded previously as well without an account. Now they want you to login, give jucy permissions on your phone and upload all the “usage” data … for security.
Hue has this thing called Hue Labs and it’s the shittiest UX ever. It’s an internal browser in the Hue app to add special things like color changing patterns. In Hue Labs it is about 25% useful features you’d want in the app (things like triggering a routine with a Hue button), 25% fun things you’d want in the app (like color gradients), and 50% of the wackiest shit you’ve ever heard of. Seriously there’s a damn officially Star Wars force game in there or something? I just want to make my lights be spooky and change colors.
And I really cannot overstate how shitty the UX is for it. Compare it to Lifx where you just tap the color gradients you want and it’s on. You have to add the thing to your account, then make one for each color combo, it’s insane.
Remember, just a few years ago when the latestagecapitalism sub was created and everybody was like ha ha you lefties, and now every single big corporation is self immolating in 2023… good times!
and now every single big corporation is self immolating in 2023
I think that's overstating it a smidge. I don't see there being much impact for many of these companies beyond schadenfreude for those of us watching. Twitter's going to die, but since Musk obviously doesn't care it takes a lot of the satisfaction from it. Most of these others - I doubt it's more than a blip.
Not that I don't agree with and cheer for your overall point. I just don't think most of this is moving the needle in any direction.
and now every single big corporation is self immolating in 2023
The overwhelming majority of people simply do not care. So no, they're not self-immolating. They understand that people don't give two shits.
Late stage capitalism is a myth.
Just listened to the audibook version of this not that long ago. This is the kind of shit they should be teaching people about in school now.
Well, look who’s looking like an idiot for setting up my entire house with Hue lights recently after running two bulbs with local control for years… sigh it’s getting mighty frustrating having to deal with companies hoarding your data.
Those lights use ZigBee, right? Should’ve work with HomeAssistant and a ZigBee dongle?
Yeah, I’ll look into that. It’s just a shame to have to do extra work and spend extra money because a company decides to screw you over after your purchase.
Lately it is getting more like we are not just the consumers, we are the product. It is very uncomfortable.
Lately?
It has been the case for well over a decade but for free web stuff. Philips Hue lights are expensive and still they pull this shit. That's something that just started quite recently.
This was the final push I needed to switch over to Home Assistant and their hub. I needed a simple plug and play solution and Green delivered.
Migrates the lights, curtains, and will migrate more.
Fuck proprietary hubs and technology, and fuck me for buying into that shit in the first place.
Open source Matter/Zigbee/Zwave when?
I built my own, based on github.com/rmd6502/esp_lights
This is also a really good resource. I’ll take a look and save it to my to do list!
Thanks!!
Iwish I had the time
The HA SkyConnect does Zigbee and will eventually add Matter support. Z-wave needs a separate dongle, though.
I’ve literally been in the process of migrating all my Home Automation from SmartThings to HA over the past couple of weeks. I have a mix of Zigbee, Z-wave, and WiFi devices. The HA side has honestly been easier to set up than SmartThings was in the first place.
I’ve also been working on getting some cameras set up with Frigate and Coral object recognition. That part has been more involved, but I’m pretty happy with the functionality so far.
I’ve definitely been happy with my decision years ago to stick to devices using standard local protocols. Has made the whole process far less painful than it could have been.
Funny enough, one of the few things I have that uses a proprietary hub/app are my Hue bulbs – they were my first dip into home automation a decade ago. I haven’t ditched the Hue hub quite yet, but moves like this definitely make me more inclined to.
The Hue Hub (for now) has a nice and easy REST API to control the lights.
This is extremely informative. Yes, I got the SkyConnect and it’s working flawlessly.
I meant I wish we can see a FOSS alternative to these propriety standards.
Same here tho. I started with Hue and now I’ll just keep their lights fuck their hubs and accounts and cloud.
Going forward I’ll buy whatever as long as it satisfies what I need and connects to HA Green.
FOSS for the absolute win!
Its actually illegal under the Consumer Rights Act 2015 in the UK for a product to force a change on its functionality after you bought it.
Also surprised if EU law will allow this ?
I for one will be seeking a refund for the products either directly or through a court just to show them up.
Also, pretty sure it’s illegal in California to under CCPA, but there they could just turn off the lights. Which is why CCPA needs change in functionality clauses.
Can’t Hue just turn off everyone’s lights in the EU if the law doesn’t allow this change in terms of service?
That would be a charge in functionality.
No they'd have to make the lights just work if the EU got involved. AFAIK
This is a great innovation by Phillips, and it follows rule 8 from my best selling business book, “12 rules for business”.
Rule 8: The business is always right - never give customers a choice when you can dictate the terms to them instead.
Sounds more like the Rules of Acquisition to me.
It was potential decisions like this that made me stop using various IoT devices in my life.
And year after year, i am proven right.
With Home Assistant and locally controlled devices there’s no issues whatsoever. Completely locally controlled and solid as a rock ime.
Once I heard this news I finally took the plunge on home assistant.
Been a learning curve but absolutely worth it, so much better than the first party control solutions.
I wish I could get there. It works 90% of the time. I can’t figure out what is going on between Zigbee2MQTT and actually updating state. One every week or two I need to reboot the Raspberry Pi to resolve issues. Definitely more reliable than the cloud, but I am not sure what is going on.
As long as you can find devices which let you do local only setup…
I mean I’ll create an account and then block any of that data sharing on my router.
My whole house I sent up with Hue lights.
I’m Australian and I’ll be contacting the ACCC.
What does contacting the ACCC do exactly?
They are the reason Steam instituted a refund policy.
Hue can go fuck yourself, Phillip
Signify actually
Isn’t that just a Philips subsidiary?
Look guys I know you like your smart bulbs and your smart fridge and your smart mirror and your smart toilet paper but maybe MAYBE the inconvienence of having to get up and turn something on with a physical button and not having it connect to your phone is worth the freedom of knowing you haven’t and cannot be datacucked by every company that produces your stuff. Throw your bluetooth connected garbage in the trash and stop thinking that controlling home automation stuff with your spyware phone is cool.
Or take personal control. I have smart home stuff but I run Home Assistant and use ZWave devices, so it’s 100% local.
The average person just isn’t tech savy enough to locally host. Its easy to tell people to just host stuff themselves but its a lot of added complexity and maintenance responsibility that most just don’t want to deal with. I agree that it would be best if everyone just locally hosted all their services but we live in the real world where the average joe schmo is either too uneducated or busy with their life dramas to learn computer networking or just plain ol’ lazy and indifferent to giving up personal privacy as long as they can change RGB lighting with a phone app they are happy as peaches.
That’s not the easy way, though. People go for home automation in the first place to make something easy. Getting some awful proprietary spyware doodad to work with HomeAssistant is usually not the “just works” experience they’re looking for.
My neighbor bought a wifi enable rat trap the other day. It notifies her when it’s been triggered and send a picture of the cage.
A fucking rate trap and she felt the need to spend and extra $40 just so she can share her rat infestation data.
Its important to know exactly when the rats neck gets snapped with screenshots and the exact velocity trajectory of the spring charted on a data plot, otherwise how else would you for sure the trap got the rat at maximum efficency?
I had buttons for lights in my room as early as 1999 and I’m sure they existed before that. Also, the clapper exists lol. We don’t have to resort to a light switch like cavemen!
Lol good point!
I had to replace both my clothes washer and dishwasher in the past 6 months (19 and 22 years old respectively) and the clothes washer can connect to Wifi so I guess you can get notified that the cycle is done through their app. That feature will never get turned on. As for the dishwasher I bought the model that didn’t have Wifi. I mean yeah it’s cool we’re in the Jetsons world but the convenience you get isn’t really worth getting your information sold to everyone who wants to sell you an appliance.
so glad i saw this. ive been strongly considering getting a hue setup,but not after this news
A few years ago, I declared to my family that if they bring any “smart” appliances into the house, they (the appliances) would get the sledgehammer. They (the family) didn’t understand why.
Now they understand.
Home Assistant is the way. It even brought my old Music Flow speaker back to life!
My father when my mom brought home “smart outlets”: “The coffee maker is sentient enough, I don’t need it conspiring against me with the outlet.”
I have an adblocker for my home connection. By far, Hue subdomains are the most common blocked ones.
Philips Hue sends data to servers every few minutes.
How do you have this set up? Is the blocker software on your PC or is it a raspberry pi?
Yep, I started getting the prompts to create an account to continue using their app…
The app rating in Google is currently 4.5 stars. I did my part in leaving a review, and got a nice “As our features grow…” pasta reply.
Glad I still have the old bridge which is not compatible with the current app, and so they offer the legacy app separately. Though I assume it’s only a matter of time before the bulbs I have die and new bulbs require the new bridge.
Been on the fence about these for a while. Guess they made up my mind for me. Thanks!
Glad I was always broke enough to not buy their bulbs
isn’t hue a kind of vietnamese soup? bun bo hue?
Just get a bulb pre-flashed work either Tasmota or ESPHome. (ESPHome integrates well into home assistant, Tasmota is otherwise a bit more well rounded, but they’re both great)
There's a lesson here somewhere, but I'll be darned if I can put my finger on what it might be.
oh wow. i have the GE cync bulbs, everyone says hue is better [which may well be true, the cync app is complete ass + trying to connect / troubleshoot] but maybe this evens things
I’m not going to create an account. What I will be doing is looking for an alternative setup that is simple and completely local or just go back to traditional led bulbs.
This is easy for me with just one room using Hue. I feel for those who have them for all or most lighting around their home.
Does that mean they’re abandoning zigbee and not adopting Matter/Thread?
Gork@lemm.ee 1 year ago
Ooh I can’t wait for the new Philips Hue® lighting monthly subscription service, where with a low fee we can access all of our standard lighting IOT with the basic subscription plan and colored lighting with the premium subscription!
Let the enshittification begin.
cheery_coffee@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
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RiikkaTheIcePrincess@kbin.social 1 year ago
I'm gonna vom :P
JackbyDev@programming.dev 1 year ago
Folks who don’t owe Hue might not realize how close to home this hits. They have a bunch of official Star Wars shit in their Hue Labs area.
Cort@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I think they’ll start with: pay us or it’s lights out. Then walk it back to something that sounds slightly more reasonable.