[djoldman]

These seem like great examples of features with minuscule benefits on average:

> Imagine:

> Your thermostat adjusting the temperature automatically as you enter the room.

> Your TV resuming your favorite show that you were watching yesterday as you sit on the couch

> Your car door automatically opening when approach the vehicle and adjusting its seat position and temperature based on your preferences

The vast majority of people want a thermostat that maintains a constant temperature everywhere.

Clicking one or two buttons to resume a TV show is minor.

Pulling the handle on a door and pressing a preset seat position button is a minor inconvenience if that.

Add the above to the possibly flawed assumption that folks may not actually want the automatic behavior makes the "value" negative in some cases.

None of this is worth internet connectivity.

The driver pushing this is that internet connectivity enables data collection that can be sold.

[Spooky23]

It’s minor but can improve user experience if implemented well. I know several people who scoffed at the “need” for automation in car locking and unlocking. It just feels like the obvious way now.

Another use case would be access control in buildings. There are millions of insecure iClass type cards securing doors and elevators that would be easily and securely replaced by tech like this.

Another scenario is getting census/surveillance capability for security and evacuation.

Another is emergency response. If the tech was in a phone, integrate with 911 to find where a cell call originated within a campus or facility. I worked a project in an office complex where we worked with the fire department to improve response time. The Fire Department response was 5 minutes, but locating a caller in our facility could take 7-10 without a guide. In some cardiac scenarios, every minute without treatment reduces survival probability by 10%. You can easily cut that time by 50-75% if you know exactly where you are going.

In the case of that project, we deployed AED devices, created and drilled procedures for reporting emergencies (with a bias for using house or desk phones) we also required a buddy system for most after hours access. I think it lowered the average drilled response by 30-40%. That paid off when a vendor CE had a heart attack during a service event. Without that system, he would have almost certainly died. Very few companies have that kind of safety culture and budget so tech can have a huge impact.

[amluto]

> There are millions of insecure iClass type cards securing doors and elevators that would be easily and securely replaced by tech like this.

Those cards could be replaced, even more easily, with NFC cards with better security properties. ISO 14443-3A is a perfectly adequate protocol and has the nifty added benefit of not needing batteries in the card.

Even secure ranging is doable at NFC frequencies — all it takes is a vendor who is willing to do the work as well as customers who will demand it. I think I even saw papers about this years ago: the reader and the card can securely negotiate a request that the door will send and the card will reply to, and then the door sends the request and the card validates the request (against precomputed data) and replies. It’s okay if there’s delay due to the limited computational power of the card as long as the card knows what the delay is and can report the delay to the reader. This will give ranging precise to a bit time or better, which is nowhere near the 10cm precision that UWB offers but is a whole lot better than anything anyone has actually deployed in an iClass-style device.

But customers aren’t even demanding cards that are immune to trivial UID cloning.

[victorbjorklund]

You don’t need internet for this. You can just use Home Assistant with all data locally.

[api]

You need the cloud for vendor lock in and spying.

That being said, most users can’t set up home assistant. But the reason for that is that HA lacks the funding to do the insane amount of work required to offer a near zero touch setup process, and other vendors have no incentive to play ball with them much either. (Computers are very hard to use and making them easy is a giant tar pit of grueling work.)

Going full circle, this is because the lock in and double dipping via surveillance is what subsidizes all these other products so they have the funding to make themselves this polished.

This is why ad and spyware encrusted smart TVs are so cheap, sometimes even sold as loss leaders.

It’s very hard for privacy respecting user empowering products to compete with the gigantic subsidy you get from being user hostile and privacy invasive. If consumers actually cared about privacy and companies that are not user hostile and were willing to pay anywhere from 2X to 10X more for these things, this would be different.

This economic dynamic is why we can’t have nice things in consumer tech.

It’s a variation on a well known economic issue with hidden subsides. Let’s say there are two pizza places. One sells pizza. The other sells pizza and meth under the table with a code word, like Los Pollos Hermanos from Breaking Bad.. Which one dominates the local pizza market? Obviously the one selling meth. They have a hidden subsidy, so they can either undercut everyone else or offer a superior product at the same price point. It’s almost impossible to compete with this.

[victorbjorklund]

I have had zero problems connecting pretty much all hardware to Home Assistant. But yea, if you have zero technical skills it is hard to self-host anything.

[api]

I always have the cynical take that the real feature is “more spying on users and more opportunities to make features pointlessly require a subscription.” The seemingly minor or pointless benefits are just to get the stuff out there.