- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
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.
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.
But now you’ll never be able to set your room to Baby Yoda Green, Mando Mauve, or New England Patriots Nautical Blue during the big game!
Show your support for your teams and favourite characters, for only $4.99 a month, or $59 a year (a generous savings)!
Premium members can link their Disney+, Xbox, and Spotify accounts for $9.99 a month.
Don’t forget to light up your feed with our new vibrant social media section!
Don’t forget to light up your feed with our new vibrant social media section!
I’m gonna vom :P
Folks who don’t owe Hue might not realize how close to home this hits. They have a bunch of official Star Wars shit in their Hue Labs area.
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.
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
Just listened to the audibook version of this not that long ago. This is the kind of shit they should be teaching people about in school now.
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.
Sounds more like the Rules of Acquisition to me.
I don’t think that is an actual rule of acquisition but it damned well should be.
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
Late stage capitalism is a myth.
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/40Also, 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?
That would be a charge in functionality.
No they’d have to make the lights just work if the EU got involved. AFAIK
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.
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!
Lol good point!
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.
Glad I was always broke enough to not buy their bulbs
Hue can go fuck yourself, Phillip
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
AaaaAAAAAAAAAAAAAaaaaaAaaaaAaaa
That’s really all I have to say to that message.
Android is going to potentially get worse too in terms of sideloading
so glad i saw this. ive been strongly considering getting a hue setup,but not after this news