- cross-posted to:
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- cross-posted to:
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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/5717757
Today’s story is about Philips Hue by Signify. They will soon start forcing accounts on all users and upload user data to their cloud. For now, Signify says you’ll still be able to control your Hue lights locally as you’re currently used to, but we don’t know if this may change in the future. The privacy policy allows them to store the data and share it with partners.
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Ooh I can’t wait for the new Philips Hue® lighting monthly subscription service, where with a low fee we can access all of our standard lighting IOT with the basic subscription plan and colored lighting with the premium subscription!
Let the enshittification begin.
But now you’ll never be able to set your room to Baby Yoda Green, Mando Mauve, or New England Patriots Nautical Blue during the big game!
Show your support for your teams and favourite characters, for only $4.99 a month, or $59 a year (a generous savings)!
Premium members can link their Disney+, Xbox, and Spotify accounts for $9.99 a month.
Don’t forget to light up your feed with our new vibrant social media section!
Don’t forget to light up your feed with our new vibrant social media section!
I’m gonna vom :P
They can sell colors and themes as DLC! Cosmetics for your home!
They could also have lootboxes you could buy with HueCoins, a new and shiny blockchain backed in-game currency. From the boxes you would get different colors you could use to decorate your home with. Then you could also use the existing colors to craft new ones. If the RNG wasn’t in your favor, you could just buy the colors you want. It’s a win-win for everyone!
Every day you log in, you get a free lootbox shard, and when you have 3 shard, you can craft a lootbox for free. With a higher login streak, you get more shards too.
Damn…halo Infinite beat you to that.
I tried to play this game yesterday. Guess what? Requires you to sign into a MS account to even start the game. I don’t wanna live on this planet anymore.
I think they’ll start with: pay us or it’s lights out. Then walk it back to something that sounds slightly more reasonable.
Friends don’t let friends use
the cloudenshittified internet services. Stop signing up for subscription services for things that should never have a subscription. Stop giving companies your data. Even if they aren’t screwing you over today, they will tomorrow. It happens so often it’s just background noise on the news anymore. Just say no to putting your shit onthe cloudother people’s computers.the cloudother people’s computersI like that
Just say no to putting your shit on the cloud other people’s computers.
Unfortunately self-hosting is not a realistic solution for the vast majority of the population. Even the best solutions out there for self-hosting are way too complex for most people. If it’s not close to “point-click-done”, with no debugging or maintenance whatsoever, it’s just not a viable solution for most people. I’m decent with tech and do self-host a few things, but it’s a complete PITA compared to “cloud” options.
Thats way we have to organize us in groups running strong homeserver behind VPN and proxy running all kinds of FOSS web services and federate those services with other groups.
A tech-noob should trust his local Sysadmin, not some (foreign) company
That’s still putting your data in some internet rando’s computer, because “trust me bruh!”…it’s still putting it in " the cloud", but now in a way that is nearly completely impossible to enforce things like GDPR
Well, it’s not a random guy on the internet, it’s a guy in the neighborhood that you meet regularly (like a friend for example) and you trust. Well that’s the case for me, and I even grown out of noob state in many IT related stuff thanks to that. I bet anyone has that one guy (or girl of course) who is constantly talking about privacy, not? That’s the people you support and for example providing financial support on server parts in return for a save heaven for your data. But of course, if you trust nobody than yourself, you gota be Sysadmin yourself.
I think you’re severely overestimating the closeness of people’s relations to neighbors and availability of people with the skills to pull this off with high enough stability for other people to want to use it…and all in their free time outside of their regular job and personal life.
I think you’re severely overestimating the closeness of people’s relations to neighbors
I think you’re speaking for yourself here.
Maybe, maybe not…it will vary greatly from country to country whether or not close social interaction with neighbors is the norm.
In that case, I underestimated my luck having such friends…
Lol, that’s how all these companies came up in existence in the first place.
Yea, and we were happy with them in that state, it’s only a problem if companies grow too big and get to a near-monopoly state
I don’t use the cloud and I also don’t self host.
Occasionally I have to put up with a minor inconvenience like putting a file on a USB stick and carry that physical USB stick with me. The horrific inconvenience! How do I survive
I’m struggling to understand the reasoning behind this. Like these are just lightbulbs right? What’s the value in that data that I’m not seeing
Location data, when you’re home/not home, which room you’re likely in/not in. Data that costs almost nothing to produce, but can be sold for millions.
Bulbs tell them when you’re in the kitchen, bathroom, bedroom, etc. Relatively easy to combine it with smart tv, smart watch, security cam, and app/phone data to identify you exactly.
Combine it all and it’s likely they’d be able to identify you exactly and identify what you’re doing with a high degree of certainty, then micro-target you with ads or propaganda.
Honestly, there comes a point where you’d have more privacy shoving a camera up your ass. Less privacy than the DDR.
A lot of people don’t seem to understand that each individual bit of data is often not valuable in itself, but it is as part of a whole.
Basically, everything there is to know about you is a jigsaw puzzle. Many companies out there want that finished image, so they pay a premium for each individual piece of the jigsaw, and the companies you give your data to everyday are selling those pieces.
This might be a stupid question, and I don’t know if anyone would even have the knowledge to answer… but is this data ever audited? Other than possible lawsuits, what prevents me from randomly generating data points for my customers and selling them to these companies? I assume they are cross referencing with other data sets and they could catch on quickly?
When you sell fraudulent data you get sued for fraud. You can sell low quality data if you advertise it as such.
If you create fraudulent data like adnausium you’ll likely just get banned from Google.
A lot of this data is given for free in exchange for analytics from FB or Google on ad conversion…
"Big dat"a has become a buzz word, but it’s a very real, potent and also frightening thing.
As an added bonus, anything with unnecessary wireless functionality can easily be hacked, controlled and monitored by anyone savvy enough
It would be hella cyberpunk for someone to hack lightbulbs, install IPFS on them, and set up free storage for everyone.
Somebody would fill it all with goatse bitmaps or random numbers or something, but for a fleeting moment the internet would be weird again.
And now you can do it with curl!
Intelligence / espionage agents will have a field day with this kind of info.
Likely they want detailed user data and what devices you use, and they want to cross reference that with geolocation so they can upsell you stuff.
I would say it’s likely they’ll start serving ads in the app and “recommending” you other services or things like a subscription. Any app that you have to look at will get ads these days, just look at Uber.
This is why I bought IKEA bulbs that are dumb. I avoid anything that uses an app, because it will update itself to make a new thing sell better.
…are you serious?
There would be so much data in understanding people’s light usage. For example, you could figure out how late or early people get up, number of people living in a house, how crowded the house is, how many lights are used per room, etc etc. it would be a gold mine of information.
Let’s say you’re a home automaton designer. You want to design devices to be used in the home, but in order to design such devices, you need enough of a stockpile of user data. This lightbulb data would be incredible valuable.
You can probably even analyse the data and determine things like whether someone is watching tv late at night.
From a nefarious view, how valuable would this data be to robbers and thieves?
also, room names. You can get a pretty good idea of a house’s interior layout from the names and sequence of lights being activated. The ongoing attempts to map data to the physical world.
Sonos did this a few years ago and there was a similar outcry. I have stopped using Sonos devices too.
Oh God, I have an odd sense of humor. I would probably have the cops called on me lol.
Considering a lot of people are home all the time, probably not worth all that much.
I think people overestimate how much their behavior and data is actually worth. Companies only care as far as targeting ads to people. But 95% of the time those ads don’t actually do anything anyways.
How does a randomized system mess with that data. I only have two hue light, an under cabinet strip. My Echo turns them on and off randomly when I set it in the away mode. Will Phillips get both sets of data? Will Daddy Jeff share? Will he just buy Phillips and cut out the middle man?
Maybe they will buy both sets just to confirm the accuracy of the data?
“I randomize user submitted data to the corporation selling it, how could this possibly be a problem?”
If you’re smart enough to mangle the data you give them, you’re smart enough to understand the issue here.
Get rid of your sunk cost bias and think it through
You don’t need the individual light bulb data for that, just the user accounts and device IDs would tell you who lives in the house, their relationships, and you can use the IP from the app’s analytics eventing to approximate location to estimate household wealth.
The lightbulb data sounds fun, but not valuable.
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For example you can be targeted with food ads when you’re likely in the kitchen.
It builds a profile of you, and then they combine that with thousands of other profiles to build demographic profiles and then they sell this data to other firms or use it to further tune their own advertising services.
The same as pretty much every other company on the Internet. If it didn’t work they wouldn’t do it. Some people not understanding this due to over simplified examples makes no difference to that.
If it didn’t work they wouldn’t do it.
That’s not necessarily true, people do things that don’t work all the time, sometimes for a long time. There have been millions if not billions of dollars dumped into shit that doesn’t work. Using charts to predict the stock market doesn’t work, yet you can find people still doing it to this day.
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I can think of a few companies / products that would love to know that you’re in the bathroom every couple hours, for instance.
Or even anonymised, a company or study might want to buy “average Nova Scotian time spent in living room on weekends”
Big data is worth big $$$
They’re light bulbs, they emit light, it’s literally what you’re seeing
Edit: fuck, you people don’t understand humor. Is it not open-source?
sorry, alphabet bought humor last month.
Remember, just a few years ago when the latestagecapitalism sub was created and everybody was like ha ha you lefties, and now every single big corporation is self immolating in 2023… good times!
and now every single big corporation is self immolating in 2023
I think that’s overstating it a smidge. I don’t see there being much impact for many of these companies beyond schadenfreude for those of us watching. Twitter’s going to die, but since Musk obviously doesn’t care it takes a lot of the satisfaction from it. Most of these others - I doubt it’s more than a blip.
Not that I don’t agree with and cheer for your overall point. I just don’t think most of this is moving the needle in any direction.
and now every single big corporation is self immolating in 2023
The overwhelming majority of people simply do not care. So no, they’re not self-immolating. They understand that people don’t give two shits.
Late stage capitalism is a myth.
Lately it is getting more like we are not just the consumers, we are the product. It is very uncomfortable.
Lately?
It has been the case for well over a decade but for free web stuff. Philips Hue lights are expensive and still they pull this shit. That’s something that just started quite recently.
No it’s been awhile but people still spread the bullshit remember if your not paying your that product. But that hasn’t been true in awhile there are tons of things you pay for that still spy on you.
No it’s not.
Phones have costed hundreds of dollars or even over a thousand and have been doing this for over a decade.
Just listened to the audibook version of this not that long ago. This is the kind of shit they should be teaching people about in school now.
You don’t understand, your lights need to track you, how else are they going to improve your user experience? Using lights is so complicated that it requires them to train AI models to better understand the necessities of users. The methods that have worked for hundreds of years cannot work with today’s users
I’m pretty sure basic usage statistics were updloaded previously as well without an account. Now they want you to login, give jucy permissions on your phone and upload all the “usage” data … for security.
Well, look who’s looking like an idiot for setting up my entire house with Hue lights recently after running two bulbs with local control for years… sigh it’s getting mighty frustrating having to deal with companies hoarding your data.
Those lights use ZigBee, right? Should’ve work with HomeAssistant and a ZigBee dongle?
Yeah, I’ll look into that. It’s just a shame to have to do extra work and spend extra money because a company decides to screw you over after your purchase.
Know a good ZigBee dongle for home assistant?
They do, that’s how I control mine. They haven’t been connected to a hurricane bridge in over a year at this point
This was the final push I needed to switch over to Home Assistant and their hub. I needed a simple plug and play solution and Green delivered.
Migrates the lights, curtains, and will migrate more.
Fuck proprietary hubs and technology, and fuck me for buying into that shit in the first place.
Open source Matter/Zigbee/Zwave when?
The HA SkyConnect does Zigbee and will eventually add Matter support. Z-wave needs a separate dongle, though.
I’ve literally been in the process of migrating all my Home Automation from SmartThings to HA over the past couple of weeks. I have a mix of Zigbee, Z-wave, and WiFi devices. The HA side has honestly been easier to set up than SmartThings was in the first place.
I’ve also been working on getting some cameras set up with Frigate and Coral object recognition. That part has been more involved, but I’m pretty happy with the functionality so far.
I’ve definitely been happy with my decision years ago to stick to devices using standard local protocols. Has made the whole process far less painful than it could have been.
Funny enough, one of the few things I have that uses a proprietary hub/app are my Hue bulbs – they were my first dip into home automation a decade ago. I haven’t ditched the Hue hub quite yet, but moves like this definitely make me more inclined to.
This is extremely informative. Yes, I got the SkyConnect and it’s working flawlessly.
I meant I wish we can see a FOSS alternative to these propriety standards.
Same here tho. I started with Hue and now I’ll just keep their lights fuck their hubs and accounts and cloud.
Going forward I’ll buy whatever as long as it satisfies what I need and connects to HA Green.
FOSS for the absolute win!
I built my own, based on https://github.com/rmd6502/esp_lights
Iwish I had the time
This is also a really good resource. I’ll take a look and save it to my to do list!
Thanks!!
Its actually illegal under the Consumer Rights Act 2015 in the UK for a product to force a change on its functionality after you bought it.
Also surprised if EU law will allow this ?
I for one will be seeking a refund for the products either directly or through a court just to show them up.Update Note Showing Consumer Rights Act 2015 “Goods Not Fit For Purpose” alone is enough to demand your money back. https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2015/15/section/10
and as it relies on digital content to support them and this is where the main problem is, section 40 applies where they changed it for the worse
https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2015/15/section/40Can’t Hue just turn off everyone’s lights in the EU if the law doesn’t allow this change in terms of service?
That would be a charge in functionality.
No they’d have to make the lights just work if the EU got involved. AFAIK
This is a great innovation by Phillips, and it follows rule 8 from my best selling business book, “12 rules for business”.
Rule 8: The business is always right - never give customers a choice when you can dictate the terms to them instead.
Sounds more like the Rules of Acquisition to me.
I mean I’ll create an account and then block any of that data sharing on my router.
My whole house I sent up with Hue lights.
I’m Australian and I’ll be contacting the ACCC.
What does contacting the ACCC do exactly?
They are the reason Steam instituted a refund policy globally.
The ACCC have real teeth.
Hue can go fuck yourself, Phillip
Signify actually
Isn’t that just a Philips subsidiary?
Philips Lighting is a separate company since 2016. In 2017 Philips owned 41% of Philips Lighting, but since September of 2019 Philips no longer owns any shares of Philips Lighting / Signify.
TIL. Thanks! Weird that the app is still called “Phillips Hue” though. Probably a matter of time.
so glad i saw this. ive been strongly considering getting a hue setup,but not after this news
Yep, I started getting the prompts to create an account to continue using their app…
