857
Philips Hue will force users to upload their data to Hue cloud
(www.home-assistant.io)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 25 Sep 2023
857 points (97.9% liked)
Technology
59623 readers
1150 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
…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?
also, room names. You can get a pretty good idea of a house's interior layout from the names and sequence of lights being activated. The ongoing attempts to map data to the physical world.
Sonos did this a few years ago and there was a similar outcry. I have stopped using Sonos devices too.
Oh God, I have an odd sense of humor. I would probably have the cops called on me lol.
Considering a lot of people are home all the time, probably not worth all that much.
I think people overestimate how much their behavior and data is actually worth. Companies only care as far as targeting ads to people. But 95% of the time those ads don't actually do anything anyways.
How does a randomized system mess with that data. I only have two hue light, an under cabinet strip. My Echo turns them on and off randomly when I set it in the away mode. Will Phillips get both sets of data? Will Daddy Jeff share? Will he just buy Phillips and cut out the middle man?
"I randomize user submitted data to the corporation selling it, how could this possibly be a problem?"
If you're smart enough to mangle the data you give them, you're smart enough to understand the issue here.
Get rid of your sunk cost bias and think it through
Maybe they will buy both sets just to confirm the accuracy of the data?
It builds a profile of you, and then they combine that with thousands of other profiles to build demographic profiles and then they sell this data to other firms or use it to further tune their own advertising services.
The same as pretty much every other company on the Internet. If it didn't work they wouldn't do it. Some people not understanding this due to over simplified examples makes no difference to that.
That's not necessarily true, people do things that don't work all the time, sometimes for a long time. There have been millions if not billions of dollars dumped into shit that doesn't work. Using charts to predict the stock market doesn't work, yet you can find people still doing it to this day.
For example you can be targeted with food ads when you're likely in the kitchen.