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by glaucon 1658 days ago
> not sure what benefits the building is getting from Latch

My first guess would be to support AirBnB usage. I've never seen Latch but I wouldn't be surprised whether apartment owners who rent their apartments out on AirBnB grant temporary access by asking the users to install the app and then sending them "an electronic key".

No idea how Latch got on yesterday during the us-east-1 outage but it might be worth reminding your neighbours that they're introducing a significant dependency into their lives. You might also ask them how many times they've heard of targetted phone thefts by comparison with targetted key/fob theft.

1 comments

To OP, glaucon makes a good point. The "fight" can be done by informing neighbors of the issues with this dumb solution, e.g. a company tracking your comings and goings, and how secure are their servers, what if an evil bigcorp buys them, etc...

One benefit would be less need to change locks when someone loses a key, but since OP says they already use keyfobs, that's not a new benefit.