It seems almost a given that whenever the term "smart" is applied to anything, it's something that tries to monitor, monetise, or otherwise resist your attempts at controlling it --- instead, it attempts to control you.
There's enough dystopian science fiction out there that the only thing I think when I hear "smart" is "No thanks."
Regarding "smart devices" and IoT, honestly, I don't qualify it as dystopian. To me, it's just pathetic.
A "smart", unnecessarily Internet-connected kettle or lightbulb or juicer isn't going to usher the second coming of fascism to the Western world. Even data breaches connected to those devices aren't going to have any meaningful impact on an average person's life. But it's sad, because it's wasteful. It's ugly. It's bad engineering. And all of this is motivated by greed and sociopathy of people putting it on the market. With each everyday item that gets attached to my butt, I lose faith in people a little more.
> A "smart", unnecessarily Internet-connected kettle or lightbulb or juicer isn't going to usher the second coming of fascism to the Western world.
Each individual one isn't, but in aggregate they start transferring more and more control over your daily activities to faceless corporations thousands of miles away.
Thing is, most of that isn't dystopian. I can sort of buy people feeling orwellian about Alexa or Google Assistant - but as it is now, most IoT is just random startups hoping that if they abuse some users through a SaaS, they'll get to be the next Google. It never works out, and we're left with tons of electronic junk, that shouldn't even exist in the first place.
Remember that time a city in CA sent Cointelpro-esqe letters to the registered owner for vehicles their plate readers recorded going down a particular street?
There's nothing that prevents similar bad behavior from HOAs or cities/towns that have access to other data sets.
I don't want a HOA sending me brochures about recycling because my smart house reports that my ratio of trash to recyclables doesn't meet some arbitrary value. What goes on within the privacy my home is my business and mine alone to the fullest extent possible.
You can't abuse a data set you don't have. The value to society vs the potential harm of many datasets is so low they shouldn't exist at all.
> Remember that time a city in CA sent Cointelpro-esqe letters to the registered owner for vehicles their plate readers recorded going down a particular street?
No, I don’t. I’m guessing others might not, as well. Can you please supply a link?
In what way is control of your daily activities transferred away by a smart kettle? Is it not going to boil the water when I want to boil the water? If it doesn't, I'll throw it away and get a regular kettle. That's pretty much the only daily activity my kettle is involved in and no amount of Internet connection is going to remove my control of it.
Consider that many appliances might be equipped with such data feeds. Consider that it might be time consuming or impossible to find a device without them.
If your kettle is deemed an interesting part of the national power infrastructure, it might even become legally mandated. I've read stories that suggest the UK power authorities watch carefully when... Dancing with the stars? finishes, because 15 seconds later, 20% of the nation puts the kettle on. It has already been suggested that "smart" thermostats might be a nice requirement, so the power company mothership can (Voluntarily, of course! initially...) reset your temperature to shape load.
If your kettle and your fridge and your thermostat and your toilet and your alarm clock and your television and your front door and your car and your vacuum and your..... are all chirping little pixels of your life picture to the mothership, you are surveiled to a degree beyond the erotic dreams of the Stasi.
Further: this bleak picture presumes that all of these little fomites are well implemented. In point of fact, many of them are wide open gateways to black hats.
>I've read stories that suggest the UK power authorities watch carefully when... Dancing with the stars? finishes, because 15 seconds later, 20% of the nation puts the kettle on.
The classic example is Eastenders (a soap set in London where everyone is miserable) and was more recently an issue with the Great British Bake Off, but the effect has apparently declined in recent years due to BBC iPlayer/catchup services/Netflix. [0]
Defcon has had a bunch of extremely interesting talks since IoT became a buzzphrase. Not that they were boring before, but the sheer scale of incompetence on behalf of the IoT manufacturers is astounding.
To me, it's not really the control of activities that will be transferred away, it's the information that people can glean from (for example) the usage logs which can be used to build a significant profile about your movements.
For example, the kettle boiled this amount of water this many times a day. The kettle isn't boiled between 6am and 6pm so we can deduce that nobody is home during those hours, but the autoboil function initiates at 5.30am on weekdays so we know the owner gets up early. On some Fridays it's later, so they either work more hours or they're off socializing. The quantities boiled suggest that only one person is drinking a hot drink most days. More water is boiled on Saturday mornings, suggesting that someone else spends the night on Friday. External access from the smartphone app comes from $provider but two different phones, suggesting that the drinker has access to two phones.
Now add in a name, phone number, and credit card usage data obtained from a third party, and suddenly you have something that someone will want. If it proves valuable enough, other manufacturers make a similar product, and suddenly a "dumb" kettle becomes much harder to get.
Boiling regularly on weekday mornings and late on weekends? Likely someone with regular employment and able to pay bills. Boiling times consistent with working shifts? Hm, likely working class.. Boiling times irregular and most of the time late in the morning? Looks unemployed, don't sell anything on credit..
But what if smart kettles would became so popular that regular kettles would not be produced anymore? How would you replace it then? Or, more importantly: how about "smart" lightbulbs, door locks, refridgerators? Those are much harder to replace.
Thrift stores. A metal pot. A tin can. Literally any heat-conducting container placed on a stove can be a kettle. This is a technology that likely predates the written word. I don't see it going away anytime soon. We have never needed the Internet to boil water. That isn't going to change.
Imagine this: you're on your way home, it's a cold and wet winter night, you're dashing from the bus stop to your home and you want a hot cup when you get home. Just trigger the kettle to fill and boil enough for you with the app on your phone, and you'll be warm that much faster when you get in the door.
Maybe there's an autocoffee model, which makes your coffee to your preferences, and you get it to pre-boil while you're heading for home. Using the GPS on your phone with your average walking speed, it calculates when you'll be home so your coffee (or tea or hot chocolate) are just cooling to the perfect temperature when you walk in the door.
You may think it won't happen, but how many would use an autokettle? I wouldn't, as I don't often drink hot drinks, but my mother might because she won't have to hobble around. A blind person might, too, for a similar reason. People who prefer consistent drinks would - I have one particular friend who hates Starbucks but drinks there anyway, because it's always exactly the same.
yup, I just want a thermostat that I can remotely access -directly- and not through someone else's server. Just keep track of my IP addr myself, and yes if the ISP swaps it out for another I'll have to update it when I get there again... blah, blah, blah, yes' it'd be fine with me.
Yet I cannot fine one. Every single 'smart' thermostat has some corporate service I have to negotiate through for access, and of course if that is down, well, I'm outta luck. and, they're surely accumulating all of my data.
Not sure about IP thermostats, but if you're willing to get a USB stick to interface with the network, a thermostat that speaks Z-Wave might be your best bet. This one seems highly rated on Amazon[0], but there are lots to choose from.
From there I'd recommend using something like Home Assistant[1] - it's an open source project that provides a UI for a ton of different smart home gear. I use it at home to control some smart lights and automate things based on whether I'm home or not. (There's also OpenHAB, but in my experience configuring that is much more involved.)
The problem is there isn't really much of a market for something like that. Sure, you can have detailed documentation on such a product that explains how it's functioning, why it might drop out when your ip changes, etc., but who is going to understand that? People like you and me, yes, but we're a pretty small market.
In order for there to be a reasonable audience for a product, you have to target the least knowledgeable person - or at least someone pretty far south of the median. Those people aren't going to understand what's happening, and they're going to get upset each time their ip resets and they can't connect to their thermostat anymore. They're going to take the frustration to the thermostat company, they're not going to understand what the service rep tells them, and they're going to return the product, leave a bad review, and buy a nest.
No one wants to be in the position of making and selling such a product. That's why you pretty much need to make your own with an esp8266. And that's why so many of these IoT devices end up being far too bloated.
> The problem is there isn't really much of a market for something like that. Sure, you can have detailed documentation on such a product that explains how it's functioning, why it might drop out when your ip changes, etc., but who is going to understand that? People like you and me, yes, but we're a pretty small market.
I understand why this is not available as a standalone product. The window is probably too small to warrant it. I don’t understand why no company appears to offer it as an option to a product that otherwise “just works.”
Sure, it would require additional investment on the part of the manufacturer to include an “expert-mode” toggle that lets the user make their own decisions, but a market exists for people who want that. Money is being left on the table.
If what you said were true, there'd be no routers which claimed to support DD-WRT out of the box as a marketing point.
The market for people who want to control their thermostat directly is exactly the same. And the best part? The manufacturer can support that AND have their 3rd-party cloud shebang going on, these are not mutually exclusive.
> The problem is there isn't really much of a market for something like that.
These days, the internet gives you access to several billion people. Even a very niche market can translate into a large customer base and a nice, profitable business.
Is there a way to bundle a dynamic DNS offering that would make the changing of an IP address invisible to the home user. It's 2018, so I'm wondering if setting this up has become easier than it has in the past. Just trying to think of something to keep the idea viable.
It's relatively easy to build one yourself. I did it, it works great.
I used 2 ESP8266's - one in the temperature sensing and control box in my office, and one controlling a relay inside the boiler. When it's too hot the relay is opened to switch the boiler off, when it's too cold the relay is closed to switch the boiler on.
The question is, do you trust your own handiwork to the extent you're not worried it'll malfunction and burn your house down, or freeze your pipes during winter? Personally, I'm reluctant to have electronics I built myself connected to mains and running unsupervised for longer periods of time.
Well, some parts of it are a lot more likely to fail-deadly than others. A commercial power supply that outputs 12V or whatever your servo wants basically can't burn anything.
As for bugs in the control code freezing your pipes? Well, just give the code as much care as you give to driving and you should be fine. ;)
(The serious solution to that is to have a dead simple failsafe controller that switches between on, off and auto, where auto is controlled by your crazy inventions.)
For projects like that, you don't connect anything to the mains at all. Specifically:
- At least in US, thermostats control is low-voltage (24 V AC), and come from low-power transformer which will just stop working on overload (ask me how I know :) ), so there is no electrical fire danger
- You never plug anything into the AC outlet directly -- you always use AC/DC adapters (and not the ones bought on ebay for minimum price, too)
- To prevent freeze hazard, you also leave original thermostat hooked up, but set it to really low temperature (10C/50F).
- Overheating house is possible, and you definitely need to consider this in your software (for example, require periodic control messages to keep your boiler on). However, I do not think it is an actual fire hazard -- likely, there are hardware safeties in your heater to prevent that. Still, if you are worried about this, you can install a second thermostat in series with your relay and set it to max temperature you ever want.
That's a very interesting point, I built my own system, but I don't trust my own handiwork enough, so I went the middle route:
I got a Siemens RDF302 thermostat (which is a dumb thermostat with a Modbus RTU interface for remote control) and then I use a raspberry pi to change the setpoint temperature according to a remote signal or schedule.
The actual decision to turn on/off the boiler however, is still left to a "real" thermostat made by a professional company, and a malfunction of the automated system is likely to result in a failure to change the setpoint, not in infinite heating.
That depends on the kind of heating you have on the house.
Air vent heating takes 10 minutes. Radiators take some 40 minutes. Underfloor heating takes about 90 minutes.
Remote control does make sense for some, not all cases.
I'm actually looking for one for my shop, which has a longer heat-up time
For home, I agree that the programmable ones are ok, although they fall down when we travel for more than a week -- we have to either run it an unnecessary day, or arrive to an extra-cold house, so if there was a good one, it'd still be handy there.
I have it installed on all desktop machines and had it for so long now, that I keep forgetting about it. Must have edited the post, that's usually how it sneaks into comments ;).
That's how I feel about smart house stuff. I love my stupid thermostat. It just does its job. Others have added house temperature to the growing list of things in their mind on a regular basis because they have an app or emails or notifications. I set it once and haven't thought about it in years.
I'm not saying it's universally bad. Getting a notification that your front door has been open for more than a minute sounds super useful. But I personally find huge value in simplicity.
I guess I'll be onboard when those things are entirely invisible to me.
I'm almost in total agreement, except for the fact that I have a fairly flexible work schedule. Using a "dumb" programmable thermostat is nice for someone with a fixed schedule/routine. The only thing that attracts me to a remote accessible thermostat is that I can remotely adjust to the new value as I'm walking out the door from work. In the 10-15 minutes it takes to get home, the temp should be closer to where I want it. However, not enough to make me want it to managed via 3rd party company.
This freedom to opt out entirely is also the last argument that spokespeople for LinkNYC and the city itself fall back upon when challenged with privacy concerns: If you don’t like it, you’re welcome not to use it. It’s a disheartening place to land, especially when discussing infrastructure that’s supposed to be serving people who aren’t served otherwise. To Moglen, it’s simply an unacceptable conclusion. “That’s what they want us to believe, that we have a choice between isolation and monitored connecting,” he says. “Those are not adequate choices in a 21st-century world: We are designing the net to track you — if you don’t like it, don’t use it. The human race is shifting to a fully surveilled and monitored superorganism — if you don’t like that, stop being human. That’s a poor outcome. The United States is a society that was based around the idea that human beings can have liberty. So give us liberty! And don’t tell us that otherwise we can have the death of the net.
You can have a smart city without assigning a unique identifier to each individual between collections of data (ie by relying on aggregate data instead), or using the equivalent of a session identifier.
For instance, a trashcan filling up can correlate to the number of people who use public transport, but you don't have to say person X took the bus then used the trash can.
But you can correlate the timeseries of crosswalk events that leave from one city block, follow a regular pattern, then a bus boarding, then a bus departure, then a regular trash-can event.
Do a thing regularly, or have enough "anonymized" sensors with sufficient resolution, and one can mine a lot from apparently very little.
Even if the system doesn't do this directly, it's easy for a contractor with the data to do as much if the data is highly accurate.
I hope that some mitigations are being put in place by limiting data accuracy to relatively wide windows (and the wideness of those windows will need to vary depending on how busy a thing is).
I wonder what Apple would do if you leased some rooftop space in the mall across the street from the entrance to their new HQ and aimed cameras at the entrance, recording every license plate going in and out? Then buy the CA DMV records, which you can do for marketing purposes, and use that to build an employee list to be sold to recruiters.
You don't need to. That's the beauty of spam, whether e-mail or paper.
If your client wants to target developers at Apple, you've narrowed the mailing list size from several million to just a few thousand. If 30% of those are developers, then you've already improved on the usual mass mailing targeting average, which is in the single digits.
Once you have license numbers, you can get names. Once you have names, you can look at LinkedIn, Facebook, and CiteSeeer to see what they're into.
You can also gather intelligence on what Apple is working on. More AI people? More voice recognition people? More chip designers? More phone sales people?
Kind of hoping Charles Stross finds some time to comment on this. I know he's written a blog post on what happens to cities as microprocessors get tiny and cheap, but I can't find it right now. (Doesn't help that his blog seems to be taking about 15 seconds to load each page.)
His latest book, Dark State, has quite a bit of scary speculation on this as well. There's a depiction of a SWAT raid in it that's a fun read until you realize it's only a few years off from potential reality.
a bit like "Oath of Fealty" where everything is watched with it implied "not all the time". Where you have a hint of privacy but none really at all with those who hold the keys. The real threat isn't the promises made today, its what the next guy in charge does with it.
in the US there have been concerns already raised over surveillance from license plate scanners to body cameras. The idea they won't have identifiable data flies in the face of the language used to protect law enforcement scanning license plates and its not far behind before body camera recordings are the same.
> Generally speaking, the idea is that all of this data — and the newfound insights its analysis could yield — will help cities run more efficiently and innovate at a faster pace than they do today.
Is there a source for that claim?
Or, do these newfound insights merely help Alphabet provided more specialized services to communities (a net gain, I guess), and provide a substantially larger operating budget for lobbying?
If you read a headline that the national government of a large asian economy was deploying a million cameras you would go to statist surveillence. If you read a more nuanced headline that in a large asian economy, a million privately owned cameras have been deployed, as locals chose to arm up against bad behaviour, perceived threats or nosiness, you might feel different.
I am told the latter is actually as common as the former, in the aforesaid large asian economy. The state cameras are on poles and buildings, and are at similar densities to the UK in that regard (within order of magnitude) Whereas the cheap, hackable (crackably hackable, risably simply crackably hackable) IoT IP enabled cameras are being bought and sold for $50 or less, and installed freehand by concerned locals who wonder why their pet cat keeps disappearing.
It is now routine for police to ask citizens for dashcam and other static camera footage when investigating crime. The locals with cameras are often very happy to comply.
Chicago keeps trying to be super-technology-world, but it doesn't always work.
More than a decade ago, Google promised to bring free wi-fi to the entire city. The idea was to put an AP on every light pole. Lots of press. Lots of TV interviews. No internet.
It never occurred to Google that when the light on a light pole goes off, the power to the entire pole is turned off. And not just that pole, but every other pole it's connected to. Big G was counting on powering the AP's off of the light circuit, which is actually turned off miles away. Simple, reliable, century-old "dumb" technology.
But Chicago keeps plugging along. There are victories, too. But the failures are more fun.
Great example of failing, but this one isn't. I was worried tbh when I saw the detector go up in my neighborhood (the pole detectors used to only be gunshot mics in high crime neighborhoods, which mine is not!). I did some inquiring and realized it is a university project to make the city better via anonymous data. The idea is absolutely fantastic. What they ultimately do with said data is how we see if this experiment fails or not. So far, it seems to be pretty useful.
When I saw the title and saw it was cbc.ca I thought the article would be about the maddening state of city by-laws. That was personally a more pressing issue for me when I lived in Canada than potential issues around smart city privacy.
There's every chance that Sidewalk Labs would get to build infrastructure that would otherwise be illegal, and collects data that people don't want collected, just because nobody outside Sidewalk Labs managed to get access to the data.
Even people inside Sidewalk Labs shouldn't have the data. The data shouldn't be collected in the first place.
If you don't try to enact these projects how are you going to know the value they derive. The data collection is a necessary part of optimizing the solution.
Edit:
The Sidewalks Lab project is building a city. Toronto can move any people who need assistance into the society. It almost sounds like a thought experiment, but with the resources they have access to, they would be better able to assist than the city.
For example, Toronto doesn't have enough safe injection sites. The data would help to highlight that if it is collected.
A fairer exchange would be that all data collected be made public at the most granular level. If there are concerns that it could be abused or is an invasion of privacy, then they're collecting too much.
All our efforts on industrialization are targeted to cover our primary needs, one by one. The main objective on
industrialized farms and productive chains from rural areas have been to mantain us supplied to
keep working on centrilized and populated urban centers. Now, all needs will be covered by automated tasks,
we cannot became artificial agents on a flesh and bone network, fulfilling standard protocols and alienating our minds
Why not just turn off the machines in farms, keep the city empty and retake our natural environment. Let's Make the robots
deal with all required tech tasks, teach them an Anti AI (for avoiding skynet) and then we could have again a real life
living in the country side
There's enough dystopian science fiction out there that the only thing I think when I hear "smart" is "No thanks."