> Having a connected home that runs on a cloud server is akin to having a lock on your door and being forced by a corporation to hand over the key. No, it's wo

> Having a connected home that runs on a cloud server is akin to having a lock on your door and being forced by a corporation to hand over the key. No, it's worse than that. Law enforcement can completely bypass you in this case and just ask Amazon for the hypothetical "key." > Your IoT should be Private by design, running without needing the cloud. Completely agree. That's why I've been saying how stupid it is that Google's routers (you know the ones you're using in your own home) have to be configured over the Internet. Google is one of the main "bad actors" in this scenario, as it's trying to push more stuff like this with their "Physical Web" initiative, as well as the web Bluetooth and WebUSB HTML APIs. They are also part of the Thread Group, through Nest. Thread is primarily a P2P protocol that can also enable devices to connect directly to the Internet. I don't think I've heard of Google using the P2P function yet. They prefer to use only the direct Internet connection, because that's how they can also gather your data in real-time. This is also why I support the idea of using client-side embedded "machine learning accelerators" in IoT devices as soon as possible. Otherwise, Google and Amazon and Microsoft will tell us how you need to send your data to their clouds so they can give you "AI features". No you don't. IoT machine learning accelerators will make cloud connections for this purpose almost unnecessary. Most of the "AI features" you'll probably want on IoT devices (like say your surveillance camera identifying cats, or even strangers) should be quite basic and the embedded accelerators should be enough for such tasks (or will be soon). As a bonus, devices using local AI capabilities should work much better, too, because they analyze the data locally and they don't have to send it back to Google/Amazon or use your (probably capped) data allowance.