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!
I’ve always felt like the apps stuffed full of telemetry that have access to a lot of data on my phone are the most concerning part. It’s annoying too that the devices themselves phone home.
GrapheneOS has a built in network “Kill Switch” for each app individually on your phone.
As soon as a app is installed it you are prompted to grant network access to the app, you can also choose to restrict it after the fact as well.
There are also some other apps on Android that do the same that I have come across, but I have gotten pretty used to what GrapheneOS offers me now built in.
This is useful for restricting network access for keyboard, galary, game, or emulator apps for example.
Downside is the apps need internet/network access to control the smart home devices.
I run pretty much all ESPHome or Tasmota devices since there’s no app required, and it’s all LAN based communication. But the complexity is certainly very high for those compared to off the shelf stuff.
but it tapers off very quickly, namely setting up the gateway might take half a day, pairing the first device might take an hour… but then the next 10 devices will probably take 10min.
Sorta, then ESPHome updates or something and everything breaks until fixes are made. It’s certainly a lot more knowledge required to set up and manage them than most people have or care to learn about just for some smart devices.