I immediately thought of a few politicians I would like LOCK IN their homes! 
:vb-lol: :vb-agree:
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I really share this sentiment. At the same time Iām researching smart thermostats and smart locksā¦ 
Yea. We donāt have those issues here in Jersey. We get a couple of really hot weeks the last 2 of July and the first 2 of August. Before there was a smart thermostat, I would turn it down (or up for air) when I left and the opposite when returning. The load to bring the house up to temp is far less than maintaining it throughout the day.
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Soooā¦ anybody here have a preference for smart locks? Iām debating whether I should just get a dumb lock with keypad and auto-lock, and forego the whole āhook up to Wi-Fi, expose home access to internetā situation.
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Well, at least Alexa canāt lock you out that wayā¦that whole video above kept reminding me
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Forgive my ignorance, but doesnāt all smart locks work with magnets that open and shut the bolt? And canāt that just be defeated with a stronger magnet?
Thereās some motorized mechanism in there that physically moves the deadbolt. So instead of using your hand to rotate the key, the motor does the turning. The strength of the lock then comes from the strength of the traditional deadbolt thatās been moved in place, not from āhow strongly the lockās electromagnet holds things togetherā.
BTW Iām now converging on something like this from Yale. Physical keypad, auto-lock if desired (can be set to lock the door again after e.g. 30 seconds), and can be opened using a smart watch (bluetooth operated it seems). And no Wifi, so no remote hacking concerns.
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IMHO the best story/roast/satire of how an AI could go rogue and totally f*ck with you via a smartphone was an episode from the short lived reboot of X-files. Itās also quite funny yet disturbing at the same time.
āThe X-Filesā Recap: Season 11, Episode 7 ā Technology Attacks Mulder and Scully ā TVLine
FWIW my thoughts on the whole privacy versus benefits of this type of tech keeps changing.
I get that some feel ownership of some of the types of ādataā that gets collected, but OTOH even posting in a place like here exposes you to similar types of mining/collection unless you go to extraordinary lengths to obfuscate it.
And for that matter Iāve seen numerous demos of AI tech that can infer/scrape remarkably accurate data from what you post on social media such as your age group, economic status, level of education, what state you live in and even your likely career role/status.
eg. one of the demos done on me easily identified me as a middle-aged tech engineer with a wife and two kids living in a midwest state in a liberal leaning city etc.
And a serious question for some of the more vocal opponents of this is what exactly do you feel like you truly āownā and thus feel is violated? Iām not making any judgments whatsoever, just genuinely curious.
For me, at least at the moment anyway, while Iām not completely sanguine about it, Iām also not totally alarmed and/or put off by it either, and itās definitely bound by my belief that even if they have it, that itās of dubious real tangible fungible value simply because of who I am.
So Iām not talking about data like Social Security or bank account numbers as exposure of that data has real world potential implications such as a few years ago when some of my bank account data got caught in a data leak and a bunch of credit accounts got opened in my name.
So TLDR. yeah they may have it, but I canāt find a practical way to keep or restrict it and/or flip it around and actually monetize it to my benefit. And even though so-called targeted advertising can create some creepy feeling scenarios such as a sudden 'flood" of lingerie ads in our browsers was triggered by our maturing/growing up daughter, I donāt feel explicitly harmed by it either
PS: Xfiles though the quality of it is often highly variable from episode , remains one of my all time favorite shows and the episode above is a superb example of what a great show it could be.
Also @JoeS at least so far anyway in our tests, the most āsecureā balanced with most useful smart locks was the August line. Plus their āMATTERā standard compliance is 100% which at least as of today is far from a given.
@Marty potential energy saving is one of my things to determine with my deployment and the largest corporate customer we are working with is looking at this from a facilities management perspective including things like reducing heating/cooling when a facility or portion of it is un or scarcely occupied
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Medium and larger scale HVAC equipment (especially less recent models) are notoriously finicky about cycling on and off. There is a risk of moving costs from the electricity budget to an even larger maintenance budget.
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Gotta love this quote from your article @Desertlap:
āBecause the overarching theme of the episode is that artificial intelligence ā via smartphones/smartcars/smarthouses and the like ā will probably kill us all in our sleep the moment it is able.ā
Remember VāGerās mission in the first Star Trek movie - eliminate the carbon based units infesting the shipā¦
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That is/was true. The customer I mentioned facilities manager actually comes from Rheem and we are working with both them as well as Carrier as there is belief/concern that companies are going to deploy this tech regardless and part of the overall evaluation is the impacts, both good and bad if they do.
This issue is also why currently a lot of large buildings/spaces will seemingly leave the heat or AC on well, past the season would be appropriate.
And FWIW the most recent systems from the big guys (2020 on) are supposed to be much better in this regard due to customer demands for lower energy consumption and being āmore greenā in general.
And there is a theory/belief that the ITTT routines , properly managed and deployed could be useful even with older systems
EDIT; As I think I have mentioned before, besides our custom rugged tablet business we are more broadly a technical/engineering consultancy and thus why we participate/are engage in these types of work/tests
When we first installed our system 12 years ago, it was experimental and it took Carrierās technicians years to get the system working correctly. However, since then, it has worked flawlessly for the past 10 years or so. So, the extra cycling has not appeared to impact the systemās efficiency or longevity.
BTW, Carrier no longer sells our system and has not for quite some time. I think the installation is beyond most HVAC installers. We had Carrier technicians at our home almost constantly for the first couple of years getting the system balanced and adjusting the capacity of the feeder lines. There was one particular savant who was a system whisperer.
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I would be happy with robot vacuuming my house or doing laundry for me while i was away, or having light that turn on/change hue on schedule. But not my lock. Not exposing my house access to the internet, itās still physical lock and key for me.
Smart AC system is something that would probably require us to rebuild our old, old house, so that is out too. There are probably smaller smart AC system but they are still too much of a hassle to install.
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Many US and EU electric utility customers discovered that government ātime of useā rate plans with off hour savings came with smart automation systems - that the utility and/or government could use to turn off their services remotely.
All of the systems, at least that we have seen, have physical overrides/releases.
I get the concerns about giving up potentially physical control of things like access.
OTOH Iāve already deployed a ITTT routine that will lock the doors if both the garage door is opened/closed (eg we leave for work) and the presence sensors donāt detect a person.
This helps me specifically as for whatever reasons I often forget to lock/check the other doors when Iām the last one to leave the house.
Also I have now talked about ITTT routines a lot and for me that has the most potential positives for this tech.
For example, itās pretty straight forward to create a routine that will turn on the heating/cooling systems when someone arrives home, including detecting the exception where for example I come back briefly because I forgot my laptop bag.
TLDR This tech is definitely fascinating generally and I continue to see positives and negatives as I attempt to integrate it in to daily life. Iām still working through all the potential privacy implications thoughā¦
PS: At least so for anyway, Appleās home ecosystem is winning the day in terms of integrating new devices with less missteps typically in getting everything working. Next up for this weekend is adding a Roomba and a smart fridge 
EDIT: PS: just learned the physical overrides on locks are a requirement in a couple of states (NJ and California) though not so far at a federal level.
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@Marty I think it was you that was asking about the amount of data mining/collection around this tech, and part of both our corporate and my personal trial is to qualify and quantify that.
and FWIW the ecobee seems to be the largest collector/uploader so far but no idea of what itās actually collecting/sharing, though Iāve reached out to Echobee for additional information
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This might be the reason I can finally talk my wife into getting smart locks. She never checks the doors when she leaves. Granted, she has absolutely no worry about actually having someone break in to the house.
The good news, you donāt need wifi for that. There are many locks out there that automatically lock after a user defined timeout.
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@Desertlap, Iām surprised you havenāt explored Home Assistant. I have it installed on my local Synology server in Docker and have found it very reliable and easy to configure. The plus over ITTT is that you can do everything locally and are not beholden to external services or monetization schemes.