Philips Hue will force users to upload their data to Hue cloud

Remontoire@lemmy.world to Technology@lemmy.world – 704 points – Philips Hue will force users to upload their data to Hue cloud
home-assistant.io

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/5717757

Today’s story is about Philips Hue by Signify. They will soon start forcing accounts on all users and upload user data to their cloud. For now, Signify says you’ll still be able to control your Hue lights locally as you’re currently used to, but we don’t know if this may change in the future. The privacy policy allows them to store the data and share it with partners.

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Ooh I can't wait for the new Philips Hue® lighting monthly subscription service, where with a low fee we can access all of our standard lighting IOT with the basic subscription plan and colored lighting with the premium subscription!

Let the enshittification begin.

They can sell colors and themes as DLC! Cosmetics for your home!

They could also have lootboxes you could buy with HueCoins, a new and shiny blockchain backed in-game currency. From the boxes you would get different colors you could use to decorate your home with. Then you could also use the existing colors to craft new ones. If the RNG wasn’t in your favor, you could just buy the colors you want. It’s a win-win for everyone!

Every day you log in, you get a free lootbox shard, and when you have 3 shard, you can craft a lootbox for free. With a higher login streak, you get more shards too.

Yo, what if you could own Red! Be sure to get the NFT of your favorite color!

stahhhp

Oh, we’re just getting warmed up here. Didn’t even mention the system of upgrading HueCoins to different tiers, decaying crafting materials, convoluted system of currencies in each tier, upgrading lootboxes, upgrading the RNG etc.

Damn...halo Infinite beat you to that.

I tried to play this game yesterday. Guess what? Requires you to sign into a MS account to even start the game. I don't wanna live on this planet anymore.

I think they'll start with: pay us or it's lights out. Then walk it back to something that sounds slightly more reasonable.

3 more...

Friends don't let friends use the cloud enshittified internet services. Stop signing up for subscription services for things that should never have a subscription. Stop giving companies your data. Even if they aren't screwing you over today, they will tomorrow. It happens so often it's just background noise on the news anymore. Just say no to putting your shit on the cloud other people's computers.

Just say no to putting your shit on the cloud other people's computers.

Unfortunately self-hosting is not a realistic solution for the vast majority of the population. Even the best solutions out there for self-hosting are way too complex for most people. If it's not close to "point-click-done", with no debugging or maintenance whatsoever, it's just not a viable solution for most people. I'm decent with tech and do self-host a few things, but it's a complete PITA compared to "cloud" options.

Thats way we have to organize us in groups running strong homeserver behind VPN and proxy running all kinds of FOSS web services and federate those services with other groups.

A tech-noob should trust his local Sysadmin, not some (foreign) company

That's still putting your data in some internet rando's computer, because "trust me bruh!"...it's still putting it in " the cloud", but now in a way that is nearly completely impossible to enforce things like GDPR

Well, it’s not a random guy on the internet, it’s a guy in the neighborhood that you meet regularly (like a friend for example) and you trust. Well that’s the case for me, and I even grown out of noob state in many IT related stuff thanks to that. I bet anyone has that one guy (or girl of course) who is constantly talking about privacy, not? That’s the people you support and for example providing financial support on server parts in return for a save heaven for your data. But of course, if you trust nobody than yourself, you gota be Sysadmin yourself.

I think you're severely overestimating the closeness of people's relations to neighbors and availability of people with the skills to pull this off with high enough stability for other people to want to use it...and all in their free time outside of their regular job and personal life.

I think you’re severely overestimating the closeness of people’s relations to neighbors

I think you're speaking for yourself here.

Maybe, maybe not...it will vary greatly from country to country whether or not close social interaction with neighbors is the norm.

In that case, I underestimated my luck having such friends..

I know someone like this.

He’s so burned out from doing it as a full time job he can’t be bothered to set up his own system, much less everyone else’s. (He sometimes helps me with stuff, with the understanding that he will answer questions and that’s about it after it’s been set up)

Maybe if he were to charge for the service and labor and quit his regular job, and just do nothing but troubleshooting all day (frustrating and tiring in its own way). But assuming people were into that (which they typically aren’t, especially not enough to pay for it, which is part of the frustration), being security focused and enjoying that stuff for yourself becomes a lot of work very very quickly when you do it for others.

Yea, he is Crazy about work but he likes it that way, he does way more hours for his main job than he would have to (no fear, he gets paid accordingly) and does the Sysadmin work as a hobby. I mostly manage the stuff with UI (all the *arr web apps) and pay for Indexers. Our Plex lifetime is also initially purchased by me. So thats how we got there. Now we have nextcloud and soon the first activityPub instances

Yeah, guy I know isn’t crazy about work, and was a sysadmin (now security). Burned right out. He bought the Plex lifetime for me, though, because I enjoy curating the library and he likes free streaming (and can afford it which I really can’t).

He mostly just answers questions for me (which is challenging because I’m really good at asking the questions that lead me to fully understanding, and those tend to be fairly specific) and explains things I don’t understand when possible. He doesn’t do any self-hosting (other than a coax-based tv channel that runs my Plex and nothing else), preferring to leave to to me to handle… says it’s too much work and too expensive to be worth it, even knowing fully the alternatives (ofc thinking like a sysadmin, he’s thinking raid5 and full servers and stuff whereas I just have an old-ish dedicated pc for that lol.)

Plus side, I’m learning a lot. Downside, learning this stuff while not having a strong tech foundation is hard!

My next foray is into automating my *arr, and setting up self-hosts for things like photos, comics, games, maaaaaaybe Lemmy, and music (Plex does ok with music tho, so maybe just adding last.fm to it will do the job. I don’t listen to music; the need is not my own, so I need something robust and host-hands-off)

He does help me with a few things I really don’t understand though, like complex tunnel/router configuration, setting up pihole (I can do that myself now) and hosting my home vpn (I could probably do this, but he does it for me for now with a custom domain) but it’s almost the exact opposite of what you described as the dynamic lol

Maybe I should be “that girl”, but I’d be tempted to snoop. Very very tempted. “Don’t trust me with your data” level of tempted.

Lol, that's how all these companies came up in existence in the first place.

Yea, and we were happy with them in that state, it’s only a problem if companies grow too big and get to a near-monopoly state

I don't use the cloud and I also don't self host.

Occasionally I have to put up with a minor inconvenience like putting a file on a USB stick and carry that physical USB stick with me. The horrific inconvenience! How do I survive

My big issue is rarely with data i need myself, but data i need to share with other people. Using physical storage to pass this between us is not a solution as we would need to send that via mail.

Manually moving files across my devices all the time is also a nuisance that i prefer not to deal with.

You don't understand, your lights need to track you, how else are they going to improve your user experience? Using lights is so complicated that it requires them to train AI models to better understand the necessities of users. The methods that have worked for hundreds of years cannot work with today's users

I'm pretty sure basic usage statistics were updloaded previously as well without an account. Now they want you to login, give jucy permissions on your phone and upload all the "usage" data ... for security.

Hue has this thing called Hue Labs and it's the shittiest UX ever. It's an internal browser in the Hue app to add special things like color changing patterns. In Hue Labs it is about 25% useful features you'd want in the app (things like triggering a routine with a Hue button), 25% fun things you'd want in the app (like color gradients), and 50% of the wackiest shit you've ever heard of. Seriously there's a damn officially Star Wars force game in there or something? I just want to make my lights be spooky and change colors.

And I really cannot overstate how shitty the UX is for it. Compare it to Lifx where you just tap the color gradients you want and it's on. You have to add the thing to your account, then make one for each color combo, it's insane.

Well, look who's looking like an idiot for setting up my entire house with Hue lights recently after running two bulbs with local control for years... sigh it's getting mighty frustrating having to deal with companies hoarding your data.

Those lights use ZigBee, right? Should've work with HomeAssistant and a ZigBee dongle?

Yeah, I'll look into that. It's just a shame to have to do extra work and spend extra money because a company decides to screw you over after your purchase.

Know a good ZigBee dongle for home assistant?

I just bought the skyconnect. It will also support Thread soon!

They do, that's how I control mine. They haven't been connected to a hurricane bridge in over a year at this point

Remember, just a few years ago when the latestagecapitalism sub was created and everybody was like ha ha you lefties, and now every single big corporation is self immolating in 2023… good times!

and now every single big corporation is self immolating in 2023

I think that's overstating it a smidge. I don't see there being much impact for many of these companies beyond schadenfreude for those of us watching. Twitter's going to die, but since Musk obviously doesn't care it takes a lot of the satisfaction from it. Most of these others - I doubt it's more than a blip.

Not that I don't agree with and cheer for your overall point. I just don't think most of this is moving the needle in any direction.

and now every single big corporation is self immolating in 2023

The overwhelming majority of people simply do not care. So no, they're not self-immolating. They understand that people don't give two shits.

Late stage capitalism is a myth.

Lately it is getting more like we are not just the consumers, we are the product. It is very uncomfortable.

Lately?

It has been the case for well over a decade but for free web stuff. Philips Hue lights are expensive and still they pull this shit. That's something that just started quite recently.

No it's been awhile but people still spread the bullshit remember if your not paying your that product. But that hasn't been true in awhile there are tons of things you pay for that still spy on you.

No it's not.

Phones have costed hundreds of dollars or even over a thousand and have been doing this for over a decade.

This was the final push I needed to switch over to Home Assistant and their hub. I needed a simple plug and play solution and Green delivered.

Migrates the lights, curtains, and will migrate more.

Fuck proprietary hubs and technology, and fuck me for buying into that shit in the first place.

Open source Matter/Zigbee/Zwave when?

The HA SkyConnect does Zigbee and will eventually add Matter support. Z-wave needs a separate dongle, though.

I've literally been in the process of migrating all my Home Automation from SmartThings to HA over the past couple of weeks. I have a mix of Zigbee, Z-wave, and WiFi devices. The HA side has honestly been easier to set up than SmartThings was in the first place.

I've also been working on getting some cameras set up with Frigate and Coral object recognition. That part has been more involved, but I'm pretty happy with the functionality so far.

I've definitely been happy with my decision years ago to stick to devices using standard local protocols. Has made the whole process far less painful than it could have been.

Funny enough, one of the few things I have that uses a proprietary hub/app are my Hue bulbs -- they were my first dip into home automation a decade ago. I haven't ditched the Hue hub quite yet, but moves like this definitely make me more inclined to.

The Hue Hub (for now) has a nice and easy REST API to control the lights.

This is extremely informative. Yes, I got the SkyConnect and it’s working flawlessly.

I meant I wish we can see a FOSS alternative to these propriety standards.

Same here tho. I started with Hue and now I’ll just keep their lights fuck their hubs and accounts and cloud.

Going forward I’ll buy whatever as long as it satisfies what I need and connects to HA Green.

FOSS for the absolute win!

This is a great innovation by Phillips, and it follows rule 8 from my best selling business book, “12 rules for business”.

Rule 8: The business is always right - never give customers a choice when you can dictate the terms to them instead.

Its actually illegal under the Consumer Rights Act 2015 in the UK for a product to force a change on its functionality after you bought it.
Also surprised if EU law will allow this ?
I for one will be seeking a refund for the products either directly or through a court just to show them up.

Update Note Showing Consumer Rights Act 2015 "Goods Not Fit For Purpose" alone is enough to demand your money back. https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2015/15/section/10
and as it relies on digital content to support them and this is where the main problem is, section 40 applies where they changed it for the worse
https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2015/15/section/40

Also, pretty sure it's illegal in California to under CCPA, but there they could just turn off the lights. Which is why CCPA needs change in functionality clauses.

Can't Hue just turn off everyone's lights in the EU if the law doesn't allow this change in terms of service?

No they'd have to make the lights just work if the EU got involved. AFAIK

I mean I'll create an account and then block any of that data sharing on my router.

My whole house I sent up with Hue lights.

I'm Australian and I'll be contacting the ACCC.

What does contacting the ACCC do exactly?

They are the reason Steam instituted a refund policy globally.

The ACCC have real teeth.

It was potential decisions like this that made me stop using various IoT devices in my life.

And year after year, i am proven right.

With Home Assistant and locally controlled devices there's no issues whatsoever. Completely locally controlled and solid as a rock ime.

Once I heard this news I finally took the plunge on home assistant.

Been a learning curve but absolutely worth it, so much better than the first party control solutions.

I wish I could get there. It works 90% of the time. I can't figure out what is going on between Zigbee2MQTT and actually updating state. One every week or two I need to reboot the Raspberry Pi to resolve issues. Definitely more reliable than the cloud, but I am not sure what is going on.

As long as you can find devices which let you do local only setup…

True, but thankfully there are a lot of choices in that space, and it's constantly growing. And if there aren't, a lot of times it's possible to make one (or buy someone's) using an esp32 or similar. Zigbee, zwave, and matter devices should all be possible to run local only.

so glad i saw this. ive been strongly considering getting a hue setup,but not after this news

I have an adblocker for my home connection. By far, Hue subdomains are the most common blocked ones.

Philips Hue sends data to servers every few minutes.

How do you have this set up? Is the blocker software on your PC or is it a raspberry pi?

Adguard Home or Pi Hole, in a device that, indeed, can be a Raspberry Pi.

If you want it to block IoT and other device connections, you have to pass all network through it.

Is it that chatty because it keeps trying because you block it and it retries a lot?

It'd still be calling home without it, but maybe not as much as it seems?

Not necessarily. Sometimes I turn off the adblocker for days and still have the requests when turning it back.

The app rating in Google is currently 4.5 stars. I did my part in leaving a review, and got a nice "As our features grow..." pasta reply.

Edit: I've also downgraded the app to version 4.38 and disabled auto updates (both for the app and the firmware), and asked my housemate to do the same. That should keep things working for now.

Being able to downgrade apps for reasons like this are why I probably won't ever leave Android.

Forced mandatory popup after app launches

“App is out of date. Please update HUE to continue to get access to the latest features!”

It’s coming

Look guys I know you like your smart bulbs and your smart fridge and your smart mirror and your smart toilet paper but maybe MAYBE the inconvienence of having to get up and turn something on with a physical button and not having it connect to your phone is worth the freedom of knowing you haven't and cannot be datacucked by every company that produces your stuff. Throw your bluetooth connected garbage in the trash and stop thinking that controlling home automation stuff with your spyware phone is cool.

Or take personal control. I have smart home stuff but I run Home Assistant and use ZWave devices, so it's 100% local.

The average person just isn't tech savy enough to locally host. Its easy to tell people to just host stuff themselves but its a lot of added complexity and maintenance responsibility that most just don't want to deal with. I agree that it would be best if everyone just locally hosted all their services but we live in the real world where the average joe schmo is either too uneducated or busy with their life dramas to learn computer networking or just plain ol' lazy and indifferent to giving up personal privacy as long as they can change RGB lighting with a phone app they are happy as peaches.

That’s not the easy way, though. People go for home automation in the first place to make something easy. Getting some awful proprietary spyware doodad to work with HomeAssistant is usually not the “just works” experience they’re looking for.

My neighbor bought a wifi enable rat trap the other day. It notifies her when it's been triggered and send a picture of the cage.

A fucking rat trap and she felt the need to spend and extra $40 just so she can share her rat infestation data.

Its important to know exactly when the rats neck gets snapped with screenshots and the exact velocity trajectory of the spring charted on a data plot, otherwise how else would you for sure the trap got the rat at maximum efficency?

Often not how traps work

Usually it catches a limb or tail and then the rat either starves or chews off whatever got trapped

Being notified when it goes off you could go check right away to release the rodent elsewhere (or quickly kill it if releasing its not your thing)

This was an electric one. Plugs into the wall and shocks them dead when they walk on it. Quite clean actually, not sure how humane it's supposed to be though.

I had buttons for lights in my room as early as 1999 and I'm sure they existed before that. Also, the clapper exists lol. We don't have to resort to a light switch like cavemen!

I had to replace both my clothes washer and dishwasher in the past 6 months (19 and 22 years old respectively) and the clothes washer can connect to Wifi so I guess you can get notified that the cycle is done through their app. That feature will never get turned on. As for the dishwasher I bought the model that didn't have Wifi. I mean yeah it's cool we're in the Jetsons world but the convenience you get isn't really worth getting your information sold to everyone who wants to sell you an appliance.

Yep, I started getting the prompts to create an account to continue using their app...

Been on the fence about these for a while. Guess they made up my mind for me. Thanks!

isn't hue a kind of vietnamese soup? bun bo hue?

Hue is a city in Vietnam. It's where bun bo hue comes from.

Yes, so is this the same Hue as in the cloud?

"hue" refers to a color value in how it differes from other colors (red vs blue), but is separate from "lightness" or "saturation." a "light blue" may have the same hue as a "dark blue."

have you ever seen the color pickers with a giant rainbow circle, and a separate white/black slider? the rainbow circle is for selecting the hue.

LIDL is selling a bunch of "smart" crap this week including a "smart" kettle. According to the blurb "Can be linked to the Lidl Smart Home System using your WiFi connection". And I'm thinking yeah and what possible reason ever would I have for needing that? And the same is true for most smart products.

Actually, having hot water for tea or coffee ready when you wake up is one of the few really good use cases.

First 'public' webcam stream was of a coffeepot to see if it was full or not, so more folks agree with that. How about making a cup in bed and then walking towards a fresh cup, it's as if you had a very specific morning butler. I'm aware this is not a need (and I don't have or need it), but it's desirable for sure.

Only if you remembered to put water in it and happen to want hot water at exactly the same time. Besides, a normal kettle boils in a minute so it is hardly difficult to just flick the switch on the kettle on when needed. Certainly less effort than fiddling with some app.

I’m not going to create an account. What I will be doing is looking for an alternative setup that is simple and completely local or just go back to traditional led bulbs.

This is easy for me with just one room using Hue. I feel for those who have them for all or most lighting around their home.

did anyone actually go to the store and put a bunch of these in the cart?