Someone please make a Bluetooth equivalent for smart devices. My thermostat doesn't need internet access but standardized wireless control is still a good feature
this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2025
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I will never allow IoT devices into this house unless they can be used offline.
I only buy cheap shit. And I never, ever, ever ever ever connect anything to the net that doesn't absolutely need to be connected.
If I need an air fryer and the cheap one has smart shit on it. I will never connect that shit to the net. Never. Why the fuck would I? It's an air fryer. Not a laptop.
I completely agree. If it's a household appliance, it better not fucking connect to the internet.
I just recently started getting into smart home products such as smart plugs and stuff and I absolutely make certain that they don't have internet connection and use home assistant to keep the data local.
I will only use Zigbee or Z-Wave devices so that there's no way they can connect to the internet.
FFS an air fryer is a heating element, fan, and thermostat.
Why are any of them being built with online connectivity and data harvesting capabilities in the first place?!
Manufacturers: To deliver solutions to nonexistent problems. Free money.
Politics: To save our economy. It can only survive if people buy new stuff all the time. Could also come in handy as surveillance measure one day.
People: Oh how cool, I can monitor my chicken nuggets from my couch ~5m away.
People: Oh how cool, I can monitor my chicken nuggets from my couch ~5m away.
This would genuinely be handy for me though. I've got a nine year old, and have similar aged kids over quite regularly. If I'm dealing with the kids, I can't always hear the air fryer finishing. A notification to the phone that's in my pocket would be really helpful.
As you say though, there's always shit tacked on :(
There are numerous benefits in IoT / smart home and ubiquitous computing. Used in the right ways it can make your life so much better and even save lives. It is just sad to see all the wasted potential, the greediness and straight up noncompliance with basic human rights and needs for simplicity and privacy in its design.
Funny enough, it got me into reading some threads of people reverse engineering air fryer APIs (didn't expect that to ever happen) and it reminded me again of how great and compassionate some people are. Makes the stupid cat and mouse game seem even more stupid when 3 guys in their spare time can rebuild a 5 layer deep authentication stack with some unknown Philips / Xiaomi server that probably needed tens or even hundreds of engineers to build in an obfuscated manner in the first place.
I set a timer on your phone to match(ish) the timer on the air fryer
'Last year, we asked the public for their views on smart products in a series of workshops. People shared concerns that products collect too much personal information, and said that they feel powerless to control how their data is used and shared'
Thank you to these people!
Easy enough to enforce. Put all your IoT devices into their own subnet/VLAN with no Internet access. Then, you'll quickly see which devices you need to replace, or just not use as "smart" devices.
I have a ton of smart devices that don't even connect to wifi at all. None of them have Internet access of any sort.
Easy enough! except, that most people don't even know what is a VLAN, let alone have any network device that supports it. It takes a special kind of router to have such settings, and no, OpenWRT is not the solution for that as they have limitations on the minimum amount of memory the device has to have