[Abundnce10]

I love these ideas! I've always wanted to do home automation stuff but I worry about sending data to outside parties. Do you happen to know if Home Assistant monitors the things you have installed and/or keep track of the data your devices pass to each other?

[mason55]

The whole philosophy behind HA is "local only as much as possible".

There are a few analytics modules that report back which integrations are in use so that they can help focus dev efforts but those are optional. They also have a cloud service that can be used to help expose your instance externally if you don't want to run a local nginx and expose your home network to the outside world, but even that is not a way for them to monitor the devices you're running.

Plenty of people run HA with absolutely no access to the outside internet (like, the host is firewalled from communicating outside the local network). Plus it's all open source so you don't need to trust anyone, you can look at the code if you want.

[fullstop]

All of my stuff is completely decoupled from the internet. I publish mqtt messages to a broker running on PC in my basement. Any interaction with the internet, such as sending messages to my phone, happens from there and I am 100% in control of where traffic goes.