After a long day at work, you\u2019re heading home. You open an app in your smartphone and tap a button on the screen. A dozen miles away, your apartment comes to life. Smart bulbs light up, the smart thermostat starts to heat the room, the smart kettle begins to boil the water for your evening tea. A smart home seems so convenient!<\/p>\n
But every coin has two sides, and the flip side of this one is that smart homes rely on a lot of things to work. And because every single thing is subject to malfunction, the more third parties you use, the less reliability you get.<\/p>\n
A few days ago, Twitter saw a surge of complaints from owners of Netatmo thermostats who suddenly lost the ability to change the temperature in their houses<\/a>. That was a result of some Netatmo servers going down, and the remaining servers not being able to handle all of the user requests.<\/p>\n Netatmo thermostats have a manual override mode for such situations, and it\u2019s supposed to allow users to change the temperature manually, not using the app. But it seems that for some customers, it didn\u2019t work, and so they were left in their freezing homes with pieces of brilliant but completely useless tech.<\/p>\n There\u2019s another dimension to that problem: Dependence on third-party providers creates even more points of failure. For example, some smart devices are controlled with a very interesting service called IFTTT (If This Then That), which is hosted on the Amazon Web Services platform. When a glitch in Amazon\u2019s infrastructure brought IFTTT servers down<\/a> last year, users were left unable to turn on the lights or do anything else with their smart home appliances until the servers were back online.<\/p>\n An outage at the data center is not the only thing that can happen to a smart home. Once upon a time (before 2014, to be more precise), there was a small company called Revolv that produced smart hubs \u2014 those boxes that are supposed to be the center of your smart home and communicate with the app on your smartphone. The hub and the app use the server to speak to each other.<\/p>\n But, you know, businesses are sold and bought, and that\u2019s what happened to Revolv \u2014 it was purchased by a bigger smart-home vendor called Nest (which Google had bought several months prior to the deal).<\/p>\n After the acquisition, Nest immediately stopped selling Revolv smart hubs, although the existing devices continued to work for a while. However, in 2016, Nest decided to rid itself of Revolv\u2019s heritage completely, and it shut down the servers that were responsible for handling the Revolv infrastructure. After the shutdown, which happened in May 2016, Revolv smart hubs became absolutely useless<\/a>. They couldn\u2019t do anything. At all. And the app was no longer accessible. Back in 2014, a Revolv hub cost $300 \u2014 a nice price for what would effectively become a worthless plastic box in a couple of years.<\/p>\n The enactment of the GDPR (Global Data Protection Regulation \u2014 the EU\u2019s law regulating data processing) had quite an impact on the Internet \u2014 for example, some US websites are inaccessible from European IP addresses because their owners chose to avoid handling European citizens\u2019 data; if something went wrong, it would\u2019ve cost those companies a fortune.<\/p>\n GDPR has affected real-life objects as well \u2014 the Internet and physical world are too entangled nowadays to avoid that. For example, in Europe, Xiaomi Yeelight smart bulbs, which allowed remote control using an app, lost all their functionality after a GDPR-compliant update<\/a> for the app was issued. They became just normal bulbs that you could turn on using a light switch. Better than nothing, but probably not what people expected when they were buying those light bulbs.<\/p>\n Hi! <\/p>\n Just letting you know you can't use your lights anymore because we're slathering your data around and GDPR is here.<\/p>\n good luck! bye! pic.twitter.com\/3ZI2WkqPAI<\/a><\/p>\n \u2014 Internet of Shit (@internetofshit) May 24, 2018<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\nSmart home\u2019s end of life<\/h3>\n
GDPR-incompatible bulbs<\/h3>\n
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