I made his lamb shank recipe a couple years ago and it was incredibly flavorful. About as subtle as a brick to the head, but still insanely delicious.

It’s great that you have the skills to do that, but we both know that most people buying smart home gadgets don’t have those skills. I’d prefer those people to have a safe by default setup, which is why I advocate for Zigbee and Z-Wave.

One thing I like about Z-Wave and Zigbee devices is that they can’t connect to the internet no matter what, because they don’t have the hardware for it.

• This means you don’t need to worry about them phoning home with usage data. (privacy)
• It means you don’t need to worry about them being used by a hacker to penetrate your network. (security)
• It means you don’t need to worry about them being a node in some botnet mining crypto for someone else with your electricity. (resource usage)

You’ve already got HomeAssistant to connect them to your Google Home or HomeKit account, so you can still turn on your closet light from the bar or whatever. You’re not losing anything by them not being connected to the internet directly. You just never have to worry about that stuff. Instead of having to keep 40 devices that were sold by some company that no longer exists up to date on their firmware, you just need to keep HA up to date.

All it costs is one $30 usb dongle.

I interviewed a bunch of years ago with a company called “xmode social” (I was in desperate need of a job. I fortunately did not get that one.) They had a framework that they paid app publishers in to include in their apps. That framework collected your location data and sent it to xmode who sold that data. That was their entire business AFAIK.

There don’t need to be any shared features for companies to include shit like that in their apps. They just need a way to make the line go up.