STAY SPY–FREE

Reader Colin Robertson recently contacted us with a concern about connectivity and oversharing. “It feels more and more like an adversarial relationship between consumers and the companies who want to spy on — I mean, serve us,” he writes. “I’m interested in the convenience of video doorbells and thermostats, but all of these solutions involve companies that want to access your data for themselves via the cloud.”

Is removing that a realistic ideal? Those who recall the first wave of X10 devices will remember the way the local smart home once operated, and that’s not something we’re looking to revisit. While it was a more private way to do things, it was plenty clunky; switches and relays forced to carry massive antennae, only the most simplistic operations available, limited central processing