Homogeneous or heterogeneous systems

Curious why?
Not working consistently?
Not plugging stuff in?
Are you using adapters or duplex receptacles?

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Ya why? Love mine

No i just meant skip the part where I tried various off-brand Chinese brands like SimpleLife and SmartLife and Panamalar.
I still have the outlets and door sensors cause I’m too cheap to replace them - but having a haugepauge of devices and apps is annoying.

They function OK. Except for the Panamalar cam - which had a terrible app.

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When i started, i asked some IT colleagues what they were using, and ended up using https://www.home-assistant.io/ : it’s open source, free, has lots of integrations, and has a focus to keep data local (they do have integrations with stuff that also uses some vendor cloud, for people wanting to use those devices).

I have Hue (light, motion/temp/lum sensor), Wyze, Xiaomi (contact sensors, motion sensors, flood sensor, moisture sensor), Osram/Syviania zigbee plugs, Google Home mini, Amazon Echo mini, integration with my SolarEdge, integration with my electricity- and gas meter, Sonoff, GoSund smart plugs (flashed with ESPhome), NodeMCU’s (WLED)

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I’m using mostly SmartThings and Wyze, and mainly Alexa for voice control, with some IFTTT. The only thing I don’t like about SmartThings is its dependency on an internet connection for simple tasks. Home Assistant looks super cool, I’ve been looking into that.

I started out with SmartThings, and have loved using the hub. I see so many products, reviews etc online saying that needing a hub is a negative thing. I think it’s far more secure and reliable to have a separate smart home zigbee/zwave network, and only one device connecting to the internet. If SmartThings ever died, I could easily migrate all of my zigbee/zwave devices to another hub platform.

There are so many manufacturers of zwave and zigbee devices, most very affordable, that work with SmartThings and keeps everything in one app. Ikea just came out with their own affordable zigbee line too, I might get some of those.

The other great thing about SmartThings is the community. I’ve gotten tons of cool stuff working, like monitoring my ups with a raspberry pi connected to the hub, webcore automation, custom device handlers, virtual sensors to integrate with Alexa, a “Canary” bulb to detect power outages, and there’s tons more I haven’t gotten into yet.

I’m in a rental, so I’m using all smart bulbs, probably around 12 Sengled bulbs and some zigbee plugs for non standard lamps. I have 3 wyze cams, just got the lock (so glad I returned my black friday august and jumped on the wyze lock), and I’m planning on getting some wyze sensors soon for automation.

I just moved and have a new ubiquiti network setup with an edge router and nanohd ap, but I had Meraki at my last place and that worked great. I’m trying to limit my wifi smart home devices, and keep them to local control by the hub when possible. Wyze is the exception to that rule, but I feel pretty confident that the company is serious about security. I might need to get some wyze bulbs, they’re the most affordable color temp tunable bulbs I’ve seen.

I always hear people complaining about this (I actually hear it in reference to Facebook ads more often than Google, but I’ve heard both.) I really think it’s a case of confirmation bias, though. Yes, Facebook and Google do creepy things in order to target ads to you. But actively listening to your conversations are not one of them. (Aside from the things you directly ask an assistant device about, of course.) There are plenty of tech-minded people who monitor the traffic coming and going from these devices, which can easily debunk that notion.

What they DO do, and what can explain a lot of those coincidences, is that they DO know the people you interact with. They track your location with your phone GPS, IP address, and/or wireless network. They know which people are in your contact list. They know which people you’ve crossed paths with recently, based on whether your location lines up with theirs, and for how long.

Yes, it definitely happens that you’ll have a conversation with a friend about some weird topic that you’ve never Googled, and then you’ll see an ad about it. But the friend has almost definitely Googled it, or has been spending tons of time at websites devoted to that topic. And Facebook/Google/whatever can see that you just spent 2 hours with that friend. They can make a reasonable guess that the friend may have had a conversation with you about a topic they’re passionate about, so they decide you’re probably a good person to target with a similar ad.

That’s where the crazy/creepy ads come from.

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I have a friend at Facebook. He also said they have a application that follows you to other websites when you leave FB. He said you could turn it off but I can’t even find it amongst all their notifications, settings and privacy pages.

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Oh, absolutely. That’s just part of their ad network. They can’t literally track you across every site, but tons of sites are integrated with Facebook and Google’s ad networks, comments, login systems, analytics, share widgets, etc. So if you visit a website about a topic, it’s very common for them to retarget you. I thought that was common knowledge. What @minionsweb is talking about is different – Listening to conversations via microphones in your devices and targeting ads based on that. That doesn’t actually happen, although a lot of people seem to think it does, and their ad targeting practices are creepy enough that you might get that impression if you didn’t know more about it.

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Very true. I don’t believe they are listening. But…. FB hasn’t been the poster boy for good behavior. But I don’t think (think being key) they are listening.

I agree. I think their practices are plenty creepy. But actively listening to your conversations via device microphones is next-level creepy (and illegal in a lot of places). If they were actually doing that, it would be fairly easy to prove, and they would have gotten in trouble for it long before now.

But just so you understand how these companies track you across the internet, I can look at the source code of this page and see that Google Analytics is installed on the Wyze forum. Any site that cares about SEO optimization at all has Google Analytics code installed on it. You’d be hard-pressed to find a site that doesn’t, really.

The main Wyze site has both Google and Facebook analytics code on it. Again, this is extremely common. That means that if you visit wyze.com directly, whether or not you accessed it through Facebook or Google, Facebook and Google still know you were here, and can target ads to you based on that.

Similarly, if someone else at your same location or connected to your same wireless network does that, you might get target with the same ads, since it may assume that you’re connected with the person.

(Edit: Or someone who did that earlier at a different location, and then spends time with you at the same location.)

Yes, FB can follow you around after you leave. Yes, you can block FB from doing that, but you have to do it with your browser. There are several add-ons that will do this. But a few browsers have in turn blocked those add-ons due to pressure from FB.

You can’t expect FB to turn off their ability to follow you. Their ad business is their bread and butter.

Kinda. You can block their cookies, but that doesn’t stop their code snippets from sniffing your IP and figuring out who you are. If you’re REALLY careful, using a VPN and disabling cookies, etc, you could probably get around their tracking. But you’d have to make some pretty conscious efforts. They’re actually facing some legal questions about some of those practices now.

Another one is that even when you disable location tracking, they DO still track your location – just not via GPS. In addition to your IP, (obviously) if their apps are on your phone, they can see which wireless networks are nearby, which is nearly as good as GPS. In some cases, it’s actually more precise than GPS, like in large cities where GPS can be partially blocked by tall buildings.

FB uses a different kind of cookies (LSOs, I forgot what they stand for), which is why blocking cookies doesn’t work.

Those are less of an issue than they used to be, now that Flash is usually disabled by default. But yes, Flash has its own cookie system that those companies will try to use if your normal cookies are disabled.

I do use a VPN now, escaping FB stalking is one of the reasons I started.

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I don’t have a FB account. Wyze was kind enough to allow me to use my wife’s account. I just sign any post I do so people can get mad at me and not her. :joy:

I’ve got Pi-hole running on a Raspberry Pi that acts as the dns server for my home network. I added a few lists of domains to block that have to do with ads, tracking and malware. I just checked, and over the last 24 hours it’s blocked 11% of all traffic on my network, or 6,000 queries.

It was pretty easy to set up, and the Pi is only $35, and you can use it for tons of other fun stuff.

I never see ads anymore, and Facebook and Google can’t do much tracking. I also use my Ubiquiti edge router for VPN, so I can use my home network and not pay for a VPN service anymore when traveling.

Just to be clear, this doesn’t stop all tracking, and it’s just one layer of security in a multi-layer approach. This blocks specific domains, not facebook.com, but a lot of subdomains they use for tracking and ads like pixel.facebook.com, graph.facebook.com, ads.facebook.com, edge-mqtt.facebook.com, etc. It actually broke Messenger on my phone for a while, and I had to remove a subdomain from the blacklist to get it to work again.

I also use 1blocker and other browser extensions for blocking.

As a net/sys/db/sw engineer for a few decades plus, I know the ins & outs.
I am particularly sensitive to this as that element of my work is extensively medical & insurance related and heavily government regulated.
Additionally my wife is an insurance business executive.

Also as an entrepreneur in a completely different industry as well, I refuse to share contacts with any app.
Contacts are not stored in google accounts, this is for my customer privacy.

I am adamant about privacy policy & 20 years of clients expectations.
My communications with customers is via my db driven mail list domain, a hassle for scripting but privacy protected.
Purposefully do not have tracking active on devices.
My friend nor I use facebook et al or social media aside from work/business (in my case approaching 8 years).

What I have found is always listening devices aren’t active but do flag keywords.
Download your device data, cross reference passive convos to ads parsed.
There are instances beyond coincidence.
I heavily filter & traffic redirect here, to log not block, so I can track what is incoming, then do monthly filter tweaking accordingly.

I am past debunk.

Now is he as crazy as me & locked down?
Hell no, so what he uses (ie maps/FmP/contact storage) is likely far more exposed.
Is what he experienced, vs what happens to me, vastly different?
Yep.

In this case, we had not discussed anything non verbally, it was a spontaneous convo, we had not corresponded, searched, nada.
Is it possible he queried something long ago, of course.
But not recently.
Have we spent time recently socializing at each others homes not broaching the topics recently before this instance? Yes.

Stuff happens, it is not just anecdotal.
Likely not as frequently as people suggest, but it does happen.

Anyhow, I made this way OT, my apologies, if to go further, I suggest this convo live elsewhere than this thread :slight_smile:

I may be misunderstanding your question, but it sounds like what you’re looking for is something like HAss, but maybe a bit more user friendly and widely supported? E.g. support from Wyze?

I’m still trying to make HA work with the variety of different devices I have. I’d like my cams to record to my local server, and also serve real time info. I’d like to be able to do things like turn on specific lights based on the sunrise/sunset times for my part of the world. I’d like to add some variability to my thermostat based on times that are more complex than a couple of specific times a day. And I’d like some sort of voice automation that doesn’t send my data elsewhere to be mined by some 3rd party.

I’m a reasonably technical guy, but this stuff is harder than it should be. I’d also like to be able to do things like bounce my router and modem 1-2x a week. I have the security side mainly dialed in, but again this should all be a bit easier. And there should be standards in this industry much like there are for other parts of the electronics/computing industry (like IEEE). /rant