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!
The Smart Home Trap: Is It Really Too Difficult To Use A Light Switch?
The Internet Person Challenge: imagine a context you haven’t yet experienced.
Impossible.
The internet was supposed to open our minds by letting us see the incredible diversity of how other people live their lives, but all we do 90% of the time is try to dunk on complete strangers (often imaginary ones, at that!) for not living exactly the same way.
I’ve met enough people that need accommodations to know that I have a horrible intuition about what’s going to be easy or hard for someone to do, and what will help or not.
IMO just let people do their thing. They know themselves better than you do.
(And if you see a story about how they’re getting exploited by an evil megacorp, and you feel the impulse to victim-blame, you can always just hit yourself in the dick with a hammer instead.)
So many words to defend not wanting to flip a light switch. “Smart” stuff should still exist for accessibility purposes, it would be easier to strictly regulate it if it was used explicitly and exclusively as a medical device, but your average person in nearly all instances can and should be using a light switch manually. Making everything complex and eventually ewaste is trading our collective future for your temporary convenience.
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yes, actually.
the one of the switches in my office controls one of the only outlets, which has a pc plugged into it. so yes, a zigbee smart bulb is the better option than just flipping the switch. it’s a single widget on my phone, and there’s a remote, and i can control it from my pc. it just runs off home assistant, there’s no internet involved, and i don’t even have to use the wifi for it.
i swear you people just invent difficulty out of nothing.
Says the guy intentionally running a computer off a switched outlet and complaining about how hard that makes things
In my house, the switched outlets are the only grounded ones on the second floor. Kind of a no-win proposition there.
Honestly, if I were running a PC off it I’d go to the trouble of rewiring to bypass the switch.
Yeah, i deal with this too.
When the options are
How are people so surprised that not everyone wants to do electrical work?
I have electrical experience so it’s easy for me, but I can definitely understand not wanting to touch AC power. If you do it wrong you can die or burn your house down. It’s easy and not a lot of variations, but how many people do you know who just can’t follow step by step instructions and the stakes are higher here than just factory reset the device if you mess up.
You can modify the outlet so that only one plug is controlled by the switch. It’s very easy to do, actually. I had to do this in my home for that exact reason, incidentally - the only available outlet for my PC was on the switch. Just modified the outlet, and now only the top plug is controlled by the switch. I have the lamp plugged in the switch half and my PC in the other half.
I watched a video about how to do this, and i would not be comfortable doing it.
I’m glad it is easy for you though!
Easier than replacing a light switch, which I’ve also done. And then had to re-do when I accidentally put it in upside down. The main thing about doing any minor electrical work is to ALWAYS, ALWAYS, ALWAYS turn off the power at the breaker box and ensure it is off before you start. Better to be cautious than a crispy critter, lol
I’m OK with that part. I’m not confident i can do the work correctly or with high enough quality to not result in a fire some day.
Too much risk that i connect the wrong wire, or screw something down wrong, such that it seems to work OK, but is actually dangerous.
There’s a reason electricians have to be certified after all.
I have a similar but different issue. These things are good.
https://www.homedepot.com/p/Commercial-Electric-White-Plastic-Toggle-Switch-Guards-for-Wall-Plates-2-Pack-7921385/327105351
I think opening an app to turn on a lamp is more work than it’s worth. We actually avoid anything that requires an app at this point.
The key benefit of smart home tech isn’t to control stuff with an app instead of a switch, it’s to automate it so you don’t have to do anything at all.
Other than the thermostat, I can’t think of anything in my home that I want to change automatically without manual intervention.
I have a few “smart” plugs. I generally don’t use the app to turn them off or on, but being able to schedule them is what I think makes them valuable.
I bought the cheapest coffeemaker I could find that has a physical switch and plugged it into a smart switch so that it turns on every morning, Monday through Friday, at a specific time. On the weekends I do use the app because I can start the coffee brewing while I am still in bed and it will be ready when I get downstairs.
Could all of this be done without an IoT device? Yes, in college I had one of those old school mechanical timer switches to do the same thing. It is just that now I get more control over how it works.
The point of these isn’t just to “use an app” to do things you could easily do yourself, but to get additional functionality from an app that simply pushing a button couldn’t do.
I think you just described my coffee maker that I got from Costco. That’s a lot of extra steps to make a device that already exists.
I have that same Cuisinart from Costco, and the built-in program does just fine itself. There also must be a battery because the clock doesn’t lose time when the power goes out
Yes, a coffee maker that connects to the internet does exist, usually for more than I spent on everything involved, and also usually with its own headaches.
I find that usually those devices all want their OWN app installed, so instead of just your home assistant, you have HA, and the Mr Coffee app, and the GE app, and whatever else, each with their own requests for telemetry and whatnot.
Building your own out of simple devices gives you more control and an easier vector to secure.
But in your use case why does the coffee maker have to connect to the internet?
It doesn’t HAVE to be but it makes it easy to have a schedule that only runs in certain days and it allows me to turn it on from the other room.
The challenge is not the light switch. The challenge is not stubbing your toe on the way to the bed.
You tell that to my kids 😂
No, but app-controlled lights are probably also the least useful aspect of a smarthome setup.
I have lived in 2 locations with the light switch at the front door, doesn’t control the entry lights. I was forced to use smart bulbs to keep from walking into a pitch black house.
I just turned on my office light within Snap, an open source environment to teach kid programming, literally minutes ago. I didn’t even know that was possible 1h ago.
As others pointed out the point isn’t to replace a switch, the point is to get efficient or creative or both with your home. Of course if your mind can handle a switch with a light bulb, no need to do more.
PS: no data left my home, no WiFi requirement, no third-party proprietary app. Sure most “Smart Home” setup are horrible in many ways, both privacy and security, but it’s not because the most popular way sucks that all ways do.