This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
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.
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.
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 cloud~~ enshittified 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 on ~~the cloud~~ other people's computers.
~~the cloud~~ other people's computers
I like that
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
…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?
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 $$$
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.
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!
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.
They do, that's how I control mine. They haven't been connected to a hurricane bridge in over a year at this point
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.
Lately it is getting more like we are not just the consumers, we are the product. It is very uncomfortable.
Lately?
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 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.
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.
It was potential decisions like this that made me stop using various IoT devices in my life.
And year after year, i am proven right.
With Home Assistant and locally controlled devices there's no issues whatsoever. Completely locally controlled and solid as a rock ime.
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...
The app rating in Google is currently 4.5 stars. I did my part in leaving a review, and got a nice "As our features grow..." pasta reply.
Edit: I've also downgraded the app to version 4.38 and disabled auto updates (both for the app and the firmware), and asked my housemate to do the same. That should keep things working for now.
Being able to downgrade apps for reasons like this are why I probably won't ever leave Android.
Forced mandatory popup after app launches
“App is out of date. Please update HUE to continue to get access to the latest features!”
It’s coming
I have an adblocker for my home connection. By far, Hue subdomains are the most common blocked ones.
Philips Hue sends data to servers every few minutes.
Glad I still have the old bridge which is not compatible with the current app, and so they offer the legacy app separately. Though I assume it's only a matter of time before the bulbs I have die and new bulbs require the new bridge.
A few years ago, I declared to my family that if they bring any "smart" appliances into the house, they (the appliances) would get the sledgehammer. They (the family) didn't understand why.
Now they understand.
Home Assistant is the way. It even brought my old Music Flow speaker back to life!
Look guys I know you like your smart bulbs and your smart fridge and your smart mirror and your smart toilet paper but maybe MAYBE the inconvienence of having to get up and turn something on with a physical button and not having it connect to your phone is worth the freedom of knowing you haven't and cannot be datacucked by every company that produces your stuff. Throw your bluetooth connected garbage in the trash and stop thinking that controlling home automation stuff with your spyware phone is cool.
Or take personal control. I have smart home stuff but I run Home Assistant and use ZWave devices, so it's 100% local.
My neighbor bought a wifi enable rat trap the other day. It notifies her when it's been triggered and send a picture of the cage.
A fucking rat trap and she felt the need to spend and extra $40 just so she can share her rat infestation data.
I had buttons for lights in my room as early as 1999 and I'm sure they existed before that. Also, the clapper exists lol. We don't have to resort to a light switch like cavemen!
Glad I was always broke enough to not buy their bulbs
Been on the fence about these for a while. Guess they made up my mind for me. Thanks!
