this post was submitted on 25 May 2025
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remember when Texas power turned off peoples heaters when they were freezing to death as Rafael Edward Cruz went on a tropical vacation?
yeah, they did that because those people registered their smart thermostats with the company and gave them control to set the temperatures in their own damn homes.
"smart" means, "you don't own it".
That depends on the kind of "smart".
I have a bunch of IKEA "smart" light bulbs, but they are connected through a Sonoff USB Zigbee dongle. And all of it is controlled through the open-source zigbee2mqtt and home-assistant.
No one, but myself and my family, have any control or ownership of any of those devices.
*until the ZigBee alliance is purchased by a large corporation.
wait that happened when it merged into the Connectivity Standards Alliance in 2011.
my point is that merging home utilities with any technology is like drinking bleach. a small amount won't kill you, but a large enough dose over time will.
being in the tech sector myself along with watching what the tech oligarchs are doing should warrant at least some caution.
IMO anything that is associated with corporate interests cannot be fully trusted. I understand that IOT cannot exist without corporate buy-in, but at the same time I think it should be acknowledged that anything that cannot exist without corporate interference is damaging to consumers.
It doesn't really matter whether Zigbee was merged into something else, because it simply doesn't have any technical means of phoning home. It simply can't access the Internet.
There's no intermediate corporate owned servers, there's no proprietary software.
So it doesn't really matter what the corporation does because it can't affect my "smart" devices.
other than drop all support when "big ma bell" enters the chat with a corporate competitor and you have aging infrastructure built into your home.
it'll be like those crappy intercom wall units from the 1970s all over again, except you won't be able to turn on your lights or plugs.
Even if all support is dropped, everything is running on open source software, so nothing is going to stop working as a result of dropped support.
Finding replacements might become tricky at some point though.
Even if ZigBee became the most evil corporation in existence.
They still wouldn't be able to update their devices when they aren't connected to the internet.
In the UK, the take up of smart meters for electric and gas has been slow due go concerns that this would enable companies to do the same.
It's not a bad argument (haven't paid, turn it off) but then if you're struggling financially is it better not to be allowed to rack up further debt anyway?