The problem is that these require some kind of server. Get one that just talks to HA over your local network.
Why in the hell does a garage door opener need a server?
Oh, data collection. And subscriptions. Nothing for the user.
I avoid any home automation thing that has any cloud backing that's not strictly optional. It's a strong anti-feature. In home stuff cloud means it won't work when the Internet is down, it spies on you, and it can become a brick or start requiring a subscription at any time.
It's a good thing the piggies invested in light infrastructure and good logs with their previous houses, the next version after brick will be even better!
This makes sense (and myQ’s privacy policy is a nightmare: https://www.myq.com/privacy-notice) but I’ve never understood how this particular bit of data is valuable to anyone. Any ideas?
I buy a garage door opener. That is the end of my transaction.
I buy a connected garage door opener. The provider knows my geolocation, my name, email address, socioeconomic status, even the phone I own. Inferences can be made on activity such as "they leave for work at 7am when garage door opens".
The collection of data doesn't need to be used specifically for reengaging me with Chamberlain. It is now an asset to the company that can be sold to others as outlined in their Information Sharing section. Which basically says "we share it with everyone".
Partners can be anyone from insurance companies to academic researchers. Remember that partners aren't limited to just one data set. They have the ability to ask multiple companies: "What data do you have for all occupants of houses in this geographic area?"
> Remember that partners aren't limited to just one data set. They have the ability to ask multiple companies: "What data do you have for all occupants of houses in this geographic area?"
Yup. And to make the issue clear: there is no such thing as "anonymized data", there's only "anonymized until correlated with enough related data sets".
* someone who drives frequently may rank higher for automotive products and services
* use to independently rank other statistics, i.e. someone with kids probably comes and goes more than a single person or non-child-rearing couple. Take the dataset where you know they have kids (and myQ) and see if you can detect the ones with kids using only myQ data (plus other statistics). If it allows you to infer this property accurately enough, profit.
* Someone who comes and goes a lot is most likely not physically disabled, so exclude them from those specific marketing materials.
* someone who is home a lot (hardly ever opens their garage door) might like to spend money on useless gadgets, try selling them IoT toasters
You can access the device when you're away from home if it's internet connected. Of course, the server doesn't need to be doing much besides proxying connections.
I'm quite confident my parents and the many people like them in the world would not find running VPN/Tailscale/ZeroTier to be "easy." Nor would they have any idea how to troubleshoot when those services have issues. Nor would they want to play intermediary between Tailscale and myQ customer support to figure out which one is broken and fix it.
Having options like this is great for powerusers, but the vast majority of people are not that. They need something that just works. Of course that still doesn't mean they need their garage door collecting telemetry data, but they need something more than a LAN-connected smart device.
My wife doesn't understand what I do on the computer all the time and she's pretty doubtful of my claim that server racks are normal household items. Nevertheless setting up the HA app on her phone with a Wireguard VPN was super simple and she's got a good handle on that.
That being said, setting up the HA and Wireguard server is definitely a more demanding experience. Although once setup it's pretty much a once and done sort of thing, and they're are integrated ready to go solutions available.
It would be nice to see something like "Geek Squad" offering that sort of service instead of just running AV software while trawling for nudes on customer laptops. No guesses on what's more profitable though.
Perhaps in general, but if the problem here is "I don't want a corporation to have access to when my garage door is open or closed" I can't fathom how "Give another corporation access to my entire network to troubleshoot my VPN and LAN configuration of my devices" is the solution?
The solution is to "give my tech whiz kid/neighbor/friend, or a local IT shop two blocks over, the responsibility of managing my home network".
This is where ideas like non-shit IoT, Right to Repair, Free (Libre) Software, and even "how to not fuck up foreign aid 101", all converge. The point isn't to make everyone their tech support. The point is to allow local communities to be more self-sufficient, able to manage technology on their own - as opposed to outsourcing everything to some faceless companies that have no attachment to any given community.
Note that this doesn't preclude business - on the contrary, local businesses are the fundamental part of any community larger than couple dozen people; the ideas converge not on everyone doing stuff pro bono, but on small, local businesses* doing things for their communities, accumulating and retaining know-how.
I wish more people from aforementioned movements realized their ultimate goal (at least in form that's possible in the real world) is the same, and joined forces.
If your mass-market commercial product needs this by design, you will fail. To successfully sell a product to the general public, it must work out of the box.
They exist, but they're expensive. And the products they sell are not really consumer devices, they are B2B products marketed at contractors.
They're really two different markets, the bulk of the home automation market doesn't want to spend $10K+ for a contractor to check the same feature boxes that something on the shelf at Home Depot can do for a 3-digit price tag. Labor is really expensive, so home automation contractors operate almost exclusively on the high-end of the market.
1) Home Assistant is not an officially sanctioned option by the devices and will run into technical issues regardless whether it's cloud hosted or not (as seen by the very post we're all commenting on).
2) Even if the above were not true, at that point you're back to an internet enabled smart home device system, and now we're simply picking which vendor to trust over the other. But in both cases, the option for the vendor to collect telemetry data about your usage of the products exists.
There is really no viable way for the typical consumer to be able to both have a good product experience for something like this, and to prevent a cloud vendor from having access to their data. Unless I'm missing something obvious.
> Even if the above were not true, at that point you're back to an internet enabled smart home device system
Home Assistant Cloud is essentially a TCP-level proxy (IOW Nabu Casa sees jack squat):
> The remote UI encrypts all communication between your browser and your local instance. Encryption is provided by a Let’s Encrypt certificate. Under the hood, your local Home Assistant instance is connected to one of our custom built UI proxy servers. Our UI proxy servers operate at the TCP level and will forward all encrypted data to the local instance.
> Routing is made possible by the Server Name Indication (SNI) extension on the TLS handshake. It contains the information for which hostname an incoming request is destined, and we forward this information to the matching local instance. To be able to route multiple simultaneous requests, all data will be routed via a TCP multiplexer. The local Home Assistant instance will receive the TCP packets, demultiplex them, decrypt them with the SSL certificate and forward them to the HTTP component.
> The source code is available on GitHub:
> SniTun - End-to-End encryption with SNI proxy on top of a TCP multiplexer
> hass-nabucasa - Cloud integration in Home Assistant
Yeah so this is why I said "no way for the typical consumer to have a product experience like this" because what you're saying is true, but not something an individual can rely on.
Typical consumers have no way of ensuring their UI is, in fact, encrypting the data and not farming it out. They cannot verify the source code themselves, because they don't have the technical skill set they'd need to do so (nor, frankly, the time). They're reliant on the goodwill of whoever packaged and installed the offering for them not doing anything to that offering.
Technical power users can circumvent this because they can build/install from source, verify keychains, read the source, etc. Non-technical users can't do this, and need someone to help them. That someone will most likely be in the form of a third party organization that does this in exchange for money. They're placing their trust in that third party.
The point I'm getting at is that, eventually, a consumer has to trust a third party who may have incentives that don't align with their own. They're just playing a game of which vendor to place that trust in. This is why centralization is still the predominant architecture choice for the overwhelming majority of products, even in a world where myriad decentralized solutions exist for almost everything. It turns out that having bespoke third parties run decentralized solutions for customers is often not a better product experience, and still has the same root problem even if it manifests in different ways.
> a consumer has to trust a third party who may have incentives that don't align with their own
That's true for literally anything, not just IoT security and privacy. I mean, even for highly technical users, one can't do everything from scratch, nor even check and control every single aspect: you gotta trust the the computer hardware or OS you're using isn't backdoored, you gotta trust the people that built the place you live in didn't put half the rebar actually needed or wired the whole thing backwards or with thinner-than-required wires, you gotta trust that the food you eat isn't going to make you sick...
Same for HASS, one could delegate trust to a specialist that would install a HA Green or Yellow box for them, just as they do for electrical wiring. HA is only "third party" because the IoT place lacks standards but is in essence no different than wiring stuff from different vendors, where "myriads of decentralised solutions" exist only because of standards, and for which decentralisation essentially means everyone is a third party to everyone else.
So I don't think dismissing HASS as third party is fair, and wiring IoT with virtual wires is no different than wiring a breaker box. If you don't know how to do it it can be dangerous, and so you delegate and trust someone to do their job properly.
> The point I'm getting at is that, eventually, a consumer has to trust a third party who may have incentives that don't align with their own. They're just playing a game of which vendor to place that trust in.
The problem is that approximately NONE of the commercial vendors are in any way trustworthy. They're really pushing hard the degree of abuse they inflict on the customers, and social immunity takes long time to build.
The ultimate solution IMO is to have people trust in people they can actually trust - that is, make the third parties local. A partner, a kid, a neighbor, a small company servicing the local community and physically located in it. At this scale, trust can be managed through tried-and-true social techniques humans are innately good at, and have successfully used for many thousands of years. This is how you make most of the tech industry and adjacent problems go away.
I suppose the vendor could sell a home server device, which runs some kind of Tailscale-like technology to make it available from the internet, and the app talks to that locally hosted server.
I refuse to use cloud services, and I use tail scale, but telling the average consumer to do this instead of using whatever app came with the device is not going to work for most people
Give access to a friend or family member when you're out of town.
Allow package deliverers to put a package in your garage instead of on your step.
When I had MyQ, I used it almost exclusively when I was on my motorcycle. I had it configured so that I could tap a button on my phone that tracked my location and enabled a geofence around my house so it would ping the MyQ to open when I got about a quarter mile from home. I called this my "riding home" mode. This saved me the trouble of having to get my gloves off and open the door through the app when I got to my driveway, and I didn't have to leave a garage door opener on/with my bike.
Putting aside the very legitimate use cases highlighted in other messages, a very simple one is: you're just arriving at home, but are still not (yet) connected to wifi.
These very practical daily occurrences can make devices incredibly annoying and frustrating for typical consumers who want it to just work.
For the "working around the yard" idea, I just got a keypad mounted near the garage door. It is wireless, it just acts like a remote which requires a pin before it sends the toggle command.
That's a nice to have feature. However there are cases when one wants to keep it open for hours or, as pointed by other replies, to open it to let somebody in. An edge case I just thought about: open it to let somebody delivery a package inside, possibly by looking at them with a camera, and then close it.
Homekit provides this as well, and by default is local only. There really is no excuse for these devices not to support homekit out of the box other than a money grab.
> Why in the hell does a garage door opener need a server?
Because the user is almost certainly installing the device behind a NAT with a dynamically assigned public IP. These are mass-market garage door openers, not devices targeted to those familiar with advanced network configuration.
I also avoid cloud connected IoT stuff. I have the luxury of doing so because I have IT skills. For those who do not, accessible alternatives simply don't exist.
Why in the hell does a garage door opener need a server?
Oh, data collection. And subscriptions. Nothing for the user.
I avoid any home automation thing that has any cloud backing that's not strictly optional. It's a strong anti-feature. In home stuff cloud means it won't work when the Internet is down, it spies on you, and it can become a brick or start requiring a subscription at any time.