And this is why you shouldn't allow things essential to your life to be mediated by some faceless tech giant. Self-hosting may be more effort, but you can at least guarantee that any issues won't be as a result of some bureaucratic nonsense or administrative error. This is not just smart home stuff - there are similar examples affecting email, photo galleries, file storage, etc. etc.
this post was submitted on 22 Sep 2023
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On one side, critics lambasted Jackson as a dupe for having smart devices in the first place; [...]
Yah ... that.
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.
This is victim blaming.
Only to some degree. The guy is a software engineer and should have known better. I'd agree if it was Jenny from accounting. You could just as well point out "victim blaming" when I called someone a moron for jumping from a three storey building and breaking his legs, because it was neither his intention nor was he aware that it could break his legs. For a software engineer to employ cloud based "smart" devices and then wonder if it backfires is borderline moronic.
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.
If I ever get into smart home crap, I'll definitely be aiming for a local network solution >_>
Stories like this are why I've never really found the concept of a smart home appealing. I'm perfectly content to do it all analog, but hopefully there's an alternative out there for folks who think differently than I do.
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.
Oh, this is the same story from June. This can basically happen to anybody who uses their Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Apple, Twitter, Facebook, .... account for anything important. All of these companies have very limited recourse for customers who got banned. I'm surprised he even found out why they banned him LOL