Then your bet would've been lost. My father has been building custom alarm systems in the early 90s, before going fulltime IT. It was hard to get half a step ah

Then your bet would've been lost. My father has been building custom alarm systems in the early 90s, before going fulltime IT. It was hard to get half a step ahead of him in tech news, even for a minute ;) When exactly did this smart device thing turn bad? Maybe it's been bad all along? I refused to use a smartphone until 2014 or so. My first Android got Cyanogen within about a month. When I shopped for my first Roomba (recently RIP), I specifically avoided the WiFi models. Nowadays the "smart" devices are almost unavoidable, so on my LAN, each one gets its own set of firewall rules (usually to block them from the Internet completely). If it can't work that way - it gets returned. I've also set up a host-based blocklist for ads/trackers, for the entire LAN. It should not be this hard to protect your privacy, but the current trend is to make this impossible even for the power users. Right to Disconnect should be a thing.