Shameless plug for just using your little fingies to operate the light switches and thermostats. Everything is controlled locally and you only have to pay for the light and the switch (fingers should be included in your default setup)

Controller locally except that one case - also unless you add devices that are cloud controlled (most things that say they are Alexa-compatible, most Wifi things, etc). Which a lot of people may not realize, and it's a LOT of things). But is totally up to people to use, and there's often a way to make (or hack) those things to be local-only.

Home Assistant really is best-in-class though for most Home Automation things. It's super super powerful and supports virtually EVERYTHING, especially if you can put in a little work. And for medium/advanced users, it's peerless.

They just still have a really long way to go to be as user-friendly as it should be. Even for "advanced" users.

Fwiw, I think using a self hosted home automation setup (shout out to home assistant) paired with smart devices that don't use internet (e.g. zigbee, zwave, or matter once it comes out) can allow you to have a smart home without these kinds of fears.

That said, I would definitely agree to using mechanical locks. Although a monitored smart security system is probably still a good idea - you're letting a company virtually enter your house, but you can't rely on a self hosted solution to notify you when your power goes out, for example.

Having smart devices isn't dumb, but you have to implement them properly.

It's dumb to hand control of your smart home over to a 3rd party, though.

This is victim blaming. He isn't at fault for trusting a company to have the bare minimum of respect for his property and autonomy, the company is at fault for not actually having that respect. Whether the company is actually trustworthy is as immaterial as saying someone "deserved" to have their car stolen because they forgot to lock it.

You can criticize him for not being cautious in this low-trust environment, but don't let it get to the point where the party actually at fault gets off without criticism.

He may have made a mistake but his heart seems to be in the right place. Even if not before, it is now. His stance is commendable. Let's allow people to get better than they were before.

Go Home Assistant. They're getting closer to having an offline voice assistant too, so soon you won't need to use rhasspy or another open source solution.

I'm in the process of developing a whole home HAL9000 system.

Ikea's line of smart home stuff is the best generally available consumer friendly smart home stuff I've seen so far. All zigbee based, hub isn't required, has local control and open APIs.

There are very good and fairly easy solutions for self hosting smart home functionality. Im using homeassistant which runs locally on my own hardware, and all my smart functionality is controlled locally so it works even without internet. And should my server crash, everything just defaults to normal "dumb" control.