That’s the business version. They’re moving full steam ahead on the home unit.
we’ve made the decision to wind down the Astro for Business program to focus our efforts entirely on building the best consumer robotics products for the home."
The most adorable privacy violation yet!
In my neighborhood, a police chase ended in three teenagers pancaking their car into a house at 60 mph. They perished. All the houses had ring cams. Somehow astonishingly none of those cams were ever used against the police. Curious. ACAB every day. Also fuck Amazon.
And none of the people living on the street posted the video online, APAB
What would you expect the cameras to have seen to implicate the police in a crime?
Yes, it was 3 AM. They went out of their way to say that out wasn’t their fault because it was not a high speed chase. Despite the police vehicle pursuing at the same speed but one tenth of a mile behind until about a quarter mile away. The kids plow into the house and the cop turns off the lights at that point and drove right past it. Stating they didnt see it. It was under a street light. The camera would have proven they slowed down to look at it. The cops didn’t do anything or report it. It wasn’t until people walked by and happened to see the car at 6:30 am and called 911 did anyone show up. Fuck police.
Unfortunately, most of that (lying, chasing, not reporting a crash) isn’t actually illegal (for pigs). Police have a stupid amount of leeway from the law.
Really, it should be illegal at the state level in every state to chase people. I’ve lived in a city where the PD had that: police could not chase; they’d just find them later.
I can agree upon the police having leeway, or in other words, being accountable to no one. My city has an ordinance against high speed police pursuit. At the state level, there is a high degree of police liability built into jurisprecedent for high speed chases. That said, police are not accountable to laws. In other words, fuck the police.
Same thing happened in at my work place. Some kid was drunk, being chased by cops, and crashed his car into the building next to my work. Car crashed, flipped, and caught on fire, he burned alive. They claim he had gotten away from them and they saw nothing. It was reported by people driving past as in your case, but there were holes in their story and evidence of the contrary. My boss had disconnected the front cameras a bit prior and hadn’t gotten around to reconnecting them, unfortunately, so we’ll never know :(
I really don’t understand smart home stuff. Seems like such a waste of money to me for a negligible convenience gain.
Having appliances that are aware of your energy costs is a good reason. There is a massive potential for savings if your fridge and thermostat know to avoid running as much as possible during the hours of the day when electricity is the most expensive, for example. That reason alone makes smart home stuff worth it for me.
Also, having lights that adjust their color temperature automatically throughout the day works wonders for my sleep. It’s like having a blue light filter for your entire home. And don’t even get me started on how nice it is to have a smart TV. It’s basically Android for your living room, which means that you can install 3rd party apps and block ads without paying a premium. Who needs Netflix when you can just directly stream torrents to your TV?
I like having smart things for automating certain aspects of the home. It also adds convenience for certain lifestyles. I can control my thermometer while I’m out of the house, for example, or check in on my pets on the cameras.
This is not advocating for things like what Amazon is doing, to be clear.
Checking on the pets seems like a good use. Why do you need to change your thermometer when you’re outside the house, though?
The simplest examples I can think of would be:
- you meant to before you left but forgot
- weather conditions changed so your house temperature needs changed
- you want the house to be warm or cool when you get home, similar to the main benefit of remotely starting a car
I know many dumb thermostats support scheduling, which might preempt the last one, but if - again - you forgot to set that up or you didn’t know when you were going to be home, it would be a boon to have a way to address that.
Also, most of the smart thermostats I’ve seen have temperature threshold alarms. If a fire starts, you would get a notification and hopefully be able to do something about it. Or if the climate control system fails while you’re out, you can respond as appropriate.
I agree that there is no biological imperative for smart home equipment, but I have appreciated mine many times; and I mostly self host, so in theory I’m not giving away data. To me, the only downside is the cost, which comparatively isn’t really all that bad in many cases.
One reason we like the remote thermostat is it allows us to adjust the temp automatically for house plants depending on temp and humidity.
For the pets, or preheating your home for when you’re there.
I could see the reason for scheduling a thermostat, at least. Mostly to save money on heating/cooling when you are not home.
To save money on your electric bill. A smart thermostat will know when you’re not home, and automatically turn up the temperature to keep the bills down. It can also know when you’re heading home, so that it can turn it back down and have the house already cooled for you before you even open the front door.
You can also use them to automatically pre-cool your house at night, when electricity is cheaper. The residual coolness keeps temperatures down and the thermostat doesn’t have to run the A/C as much during the day, when electricity is more expensive
I personally love cool tech, that’s it. It’s not even about the convenience but “oh shit bro you see what this shit can do???” -kinda thing. It’s cool
What I don’t love is some asshole corporation stealing and abusing that data for their profits or handing it to the pigs
Same here, if I do get anything that’s cool new tech I’ll get the self hosted version. I don’t need anyone else having access to my stuff.
That’s fair. I definitely don’t mean to yuck anyone’s yum. I just have the opposite reaction to most new tech I guess.
If all this stuff actually integrated with other things you owned (regardless of brand) and was under your control instead of Amazon’s it would be cool as hell. Instead it spies on you with a thin veneer of functionality on top.
You can do that with HomeAssistant
This sounds stupid but I started out with smart lights (as one does) then moved on to presence detection, door/window sensors, temperature/humidity sensors and a robot vacuum/mop. I have two outdoor cameras as well.
It lets me do really cool stuff like “turn on the fan when the front door is open and it’s hot in the living room” or “make the porch light brighter when a person is detected.” The robots are great because I can have them clean when no one is home.
Everything is automated to the point where it doesn’t need to be turned on/off manually. That sounds super lazy, but if something happens (like I botched my server lol) I realize how spoiled I am. It’s really convenient to have everything managing itself and I can focus on other things.
Unless you are disabled, in that case it seems mega convenient and worth the privacy nightmare.
Without consent is one thing*. Most police investigations are not consensual. Without warrant is quite another thing.
I expect my providers to respect my rights up to the maximum guaranteed by law. I certainly don’t expect anyone at any company to risk jail by defying court orders. But I sure as shit don’t expect them to roll over and lick boot at the first opportunity they get
*) this is why end to end encryption is so important
A thought experiment: you operate a security camera on behalf of a property owner. The camera records a serious crime taking place. The police want to see the video, but they can’t force you to give it to them. The property owner doesn’t want the police to see the video, but he can’t force you not to give it to them. (However, he can stop being a customer, which will cost you money.) What would you do?
I think I’d give the police the video as long as I thought the crime was serious. And I’d do that even if it cost me money, because IMO it’s the right thing to do. I’m not saying Amazon was in that position, but I would have to know the specific circumstances before I could judge.
Oh I’d just ask for a warrant. There’s a process the constitution lays out for the government invading your privacy
“What if robots could fuck and Wall-E and Eva had a child?” - Some Amazon engineer.
I’m not getting an astro, I watched Runaway (1984) I know what they can do:
to think about it, literally every tech company is going to hand over entire digital history to either the feds or whoever’s paying them
enoughanything for itFOSS software on hardware you own or nothing when it comes to these kinds of things.
Exactly this. I’ll have all open source everything or I’m not using it. And I’m perfectly happy with everything in my home being dumb and manual like it’s 1990.
I’d stomp it to death. I’d feel bad about it too, but it needs to be done.
In the future police warrants for phone tapping will be obsolete, since Alexa is already there listening to your every word.
The novelty of Alexa wore off so quickly. Once the “maybe I shouldn’t hook a microphone provided by a corporation in my home” thought crossed my mind I got rid of all of them.
It would be cuter if it could figure out what table legs are
Nevermind all those robovacs openly mapping your homes
RIP my LG robovac. Dutifully cleaning and mapping my house without having any kind of wireless connection ability whatsoever. Until it mistook my stair for just another dark corner. 😭
Consider jailbreaking your vacuum and using the 100% local Valetudo!
It’s awesome.
I have an old mopping robot that doesn’t connect to the Internet, but even that doesn’t get used much. At least these aren’t running around with live feed cameras though…
Only FOSS/fully encrypted/self-hosted is above the law, sort of.
