An engineer got curious about how his iLife A11 smart vacuum worked and monitored the network traffic coming from the device. That’s when he noticed it was constantly sending logs and telemetry data to the manufacturer — something he hadn’t consented to. The user, Harishankar, decided to block the telemetry servers’ IP addresses on his network, while keeping the firmware and OTA servers open. While his smart gadget worked for a while, it just refused to turn on soon after. After a lengthy investigation, he discovered that a remote kill command had been issued to his device.
This is every single ‘smart device’ out there. The way I was able to block everything in 2 Roborocks at home was by setting them up in Home Assistant over Matter, blocking everything and using it from HA only (us the schedules, those remain in the robots). It’s less than convenient allowing it access to the update servers once per month to see if there’s any and then blocking it again, but it’s something.
We’re preparing our ‘smart home’ for our new house that’s not finished yet by choosing only devices that are matter over wifi (not thread) so that I can set it all up to work locally ove Home Assistant. That, in my opinion, is the best way to keep some convenience while shutting those assholes out.
Most of them, sure. Every single one until proven otherwise, yes. Every single one, no qualifiers? No.
Brands like Shelly allow you to completely disable the cloud, which AFAIK makes them stop phoning home completely except for update checks.
I think a lot of “Home Assistant certified” brands are good privacy-wise, as that means that they don’t care about pushing you onto their proprietary cloud.