Privacy-Respecting Smart Home System Can Work Offline and Sends Fake Data (www.ddw.nl) 40
A publicly-funded group of designers, artists and privacy experts from Amsterdam have designed a smart home system prototype to "prove it's technically possible to build a privacy respecting smart home while maintaining convenience."
Its controller uses an Arduino Nano to disconnect the system from the internet during times when it's not in use. They're building everything on Mozilla's open smart home gateway software. The system's microphone is a separate USB device that can be easily unplugged. For extra security, the devices don't even use wifi to communicate.
"The Candle devices offer the advantages of a smart home system -- such as voice control, handy automations and useful insights -- without the downsides of sending your data to the cloud and feeling watched in your own home," explains their blurb for Dutch Design Week, where they're launching their prototypes of trust-worthy smart locks, thermostats, and other Internet of Things devices: Most smart devices promises us an easier life, but they increasingly disappoint; they eavesdrop, share our data with countless third parties, and offer attractive targets to hackers. Candle is different. Your data never leaves your home, all devices work fine without an internet connection, and everything is open source and transparent.
One of the group's members is long-time Slashdot reader mrwireless, who shares an interesting observation: Smart homes track everything that happens inside them. For developing teenagers, this makes it more difficult to sneak in a date or break the rules in other subtle ways, which is a normal, healthy part of growing up. Candle is a prototype smart home that tries to mitigate these issue. It has given its sensors the ability to generate fake data for a while. In the future, children could get a monthly fake data allowance.
Some of the devices have "skirts", simple fabric covers that can be draped over the devices to hide their screen. If you own a dust sensor, this can be useful if your mother in law comes over and you haven't vacuumed in a while.
Its controller uses an Arduino Nano to disconnect the system from the internet during times when it's not in use. They're building everything on Mozilla's open smart home gateway software. The system's microphone is a separate USB device that can be easily unplugged. For extra security, the devices don't even use wifi to communicate.
"The Candle devices offer the advantages of a smart home system -- such as voice control, handy automations and useful insights -- without the downsides of sending your data to the cloud and feeling watched in your own home," explains their blurb for Dutch Design Week, where they're launching their prototypes of trust-worthy smart locks, thermostats, and other Internet of Things devices: Most smart devices promises us an easier life, but they increasingly disappoint; they eavesdrop, share our data with countless third parties, and offer attractive targets to hackers. Candle is different. Your data never leaves your home, all devices work fine without an internet connection, and everything is open source and transparent.
One of the group's members is long-time Slashdot reader mrwireless, who shares an interesting observation: Smart homes track everything that happens inside them. For developing teenagers, this makes it more difficult to sneak in a date or break the rules in other subtle ways, which is a normal, healthy part of growing up. Candle is a prototype smart home that tries to mitigate these issue. It has given its sensors the ability to generate fake data for a while. In the future, children could get a monthly fake data allowance.
Some of the devices have "skirts", simple fabric covers that can be draped over the devices to hide their screen. If you own a dust sensor, this can be useful if your mother in law comes over and you haven't vacuumed in a while.
Long-time Slashdot reader with 7-digit UID (Score:5, Funny)
Long-time Slashdot reader with 7-digit UID.
I feel even older than ever now.
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With a low-seven-digit ID, he’s probably still been on here for more than a decade.
Of course you’ve got an additional decade on him...
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To be fair, some of us remained anonymous cowards for quite a long time before finally giving in. I can't say that having yet another web registration has made my life any better.
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for a second there i though you had the same UID as me :D
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Time flies.
Now that's doing it RIGHT (Score:3)
They had me at not needing an internet connection.
Then I fell in love with fake data!
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I completely agree. Where/how can I buy these??
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Wouldn't it just make sense not to log the data in the first place?
I'm trying to imagine what sort of smart home stuff you would need where logging is essential. Maybe something like electricity consumption graphs but research has shown that kind of information doesn't really help people save energy anyway.
Why would you want a log of when your front door was opened, or when things were turned on and off, or of all the things you ever said to your smart thermostat?
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Wouldn't it just make sense not to log the data in the first place?
There are plenty of things that a smart home user might want to log. Electricity consumption is a good example.
It's just that most of us don't want that info to be sent to Google, Microsoft, Amazon and a dozen more of their mysterious business partners.
The mighty Arduino (Score:2)
Re:The mighty Arduino (Score:4, Funny)
How much FUD could an Arduino fake if an Arduino could fake FUD?
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Of all the days not to have mod points...
Nicely done, made me lol irl.
Perfect! (Score:5, Funny)
I was actually looking for a home security system that lets people sneak in, because that's actually a healthy thing to do for teenagers.
Next I'm looking for a door lock that sometimes doesn't close all the way, because fresh air is important. And maybe a fire alarm that doesn't go off all the time, because an occasional fire is an important part of a healthy ecosystem.
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Sneaking in "dates" to the bedroom is vitally important for teenagers to discover their sexuality.
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Sneaking in "dates" to the bedroom is vitally important for teenagers to discover their sexuality.
I was wondering what the hell this had to do with the story, and then I re-read the summary. Never would've thought "lets your kids privately have sex" would be a bullet point on a smart home feature list.
I guess some folks are just really proud of the little horndogs they've spawned.
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Our dog was the best birth control my sister ever had.
Re: Perfect! (Score:1)
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Yeah, but that's because Dutch people are too poor to afford children.
That makes absolutely no sense. If they couldn't afford children, their abortion rate would need to be higher so they could avoid having all of those expensive offspring.
In fact their abortion rate (and their fertility rate for that matter) is lower due to better education and a higher standard of living. Hardly the sign of a "failing" country.
Short lived (Score:2)
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Then I guess we should get it now and fork the project as soon as the shit hits the fan.
Voice Processing (Score:3)
One key component of this is the voice processing, and it's the most complicated part. I've been thinking I could do most of the smart home stuff from a Linux system if only I had the voice input working. What is the state of the art for voice recognition on Linux without sending the data for offsite processing? Is anything comparable to what you get with Amazon Echo or Google Home?
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There are a zillion text-to-speech and speech command recognition systems on github. Training one was a TensorFlow example for a while, I think. Just google "TensorFlow speech recognition."
Science fiction used to have the concept of a house computer that had a personality and controlled the rest of the smart home devices. We sort of replaced that with sending everything off to data harvesters. I think there's a lot of promise in the idea: a headless server that sits in a closet and is connected to a bunch
Re:Voice Processing (Score:5, Informative)
I'm the designer of the system.
We use Snips. It's not open source (yet), but works really well, and is very dedicated to being cloudless. As part of the EU Sherpa project, which researches AI issues we may encounter in 2025, we were able to develop an add-on for the Mozilla WebThings Gateway. Here's the source code:
https://github.com/createcandl... [github.com]
The Mozilla Gateway will soon be able to connect to Mycroft as well.
One of the reasons we did this, is to have a debate about "good enough AI". Companies like Google, Amazon and even Apple will tell you they need to record all the voice commands to "improve their systems". But after 10.000 recordings of "turn on the lights" or "set a timer", these systems won't get much better at recognizing those commands. So we should not take their defense at face value, and also offer users to opt-in.
You can read more about "good enough AI" here: https://www.candlesmarthome.co... [candlesmarthome.com]
More on Sherpa: https://www.project-sherpa.eu/ [project-sherpa.eu]
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I tried Kalidi and DeepSearch (Mozilla) and neither was all that good.
It's a bit more complicated than just getting the speech recognizer to do a good job though. Unless you want to have to use very specific commands you also need a way of parsing natural language. Then you can take "set the, uh, temperature to... 20 degrees for the next couple of hours" and turn it into something actionable.
Home Assistant and OpenHAB (Score:5, Informative)
There are open source home automation systems like Home Assistant [home-assistant.io] and OpenHAB [openhab.org]. If you stick to non-cloud devices, and use one of them, then there are no privacy issues.
By cloud devices, I mean things that would not work locally and require an internet host and account to work. What data they collect and send to that host is unknown, and therefore is a privacy risk. Think of devices like Nest.
Home Assistant also integrates with cloud services, which I also avoid (you are down if they are down, or if your internet is down, in addition to the privacy issues). Services like IFTTT, Google Assistant, Alexa, ...etc.
I do use Home Assistant and highly recommend it. I have a few custom made sensors that use the ESP8266 and ESP32 WiFi, and integrated them using MQTT [github.com] over WiFi to Home Assistant.
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Also mozilla-iot, which is what this project is based on. They all have their disadvantages. Mozilla's IoT server is mainly focused on pushing their own WebThings standard, and doesn't have much of a community working on add-ons to provide interoperability with other proprietary devices. OpenHab has better compatibility, but a confusing array of user interfaces, none of which is particularly easy to use. Home Assistant seems to prefer Integrating with proprietary devices via manufacturers' portals rather
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When I was evaluating a home automation platform, I evaluated OpenHAB, and decided against because it is Java (large memory footprint). Home Assistant is Python, and I run it in a venv instance.
It is true that Home Assistant supports a lot of 3rd party integration for cloud based device. But there is nothing to prevent you from implementing your own local devices. In fact, all the devices I have are local. Nothing cloud, except retrieving weather data from services like YR.No. Just find a way to do MQTT and
local lan only (Score:3)
Check this out (Score:1)
What's new? (Score:3)
I started building my SmartHome abiut seven years ago using Homematic (not Homematic IP) components.
No Internet or Cloud access is required. It works perfectly without any privacy problems and has a lot more functionality than many of the currently hyped systems. Thanks to an API I can integrate it into all my workflows.
IMHO a "smart" home and "cloud" are mutually exclusive terms. I wonder why people keep falling for that crap....
"Smart" means "Unnecessarily Compromised" (Score:2)
I wanted a few "Smart" features - lights switched according to sunrise/sunset but stopping at midnight (which precludes a simple photocell), turn the heating on remotely, check the house is still there when away. But almost all the commercial are expensive and intrusive, requiring you to sign up to an unnecessary central service hub.
What I wanted was a controller in my home that did this stuff itself, with remote access over the Internet. I'm currently using a Raspberry Pi, a domain name on duckdns.org, a
Next up: Awesome mindboggling ... (Score:2)
... Smarthome that doesn't need any internet connection what so ever! *Mindflash*
After that: Smartlock that works indefinitely without any need for electricity. Ever! Scientist are already working on this and expect a breakthrough in 5 years!