7 ms·

So you're saying that retailers will pay Chamberlain to act as more or less a clearinghouse for package deliveries in my garage, and that in order to successful

So you're saying that retailers will pay Chamberlain to act as more or less a clearinghouse for package deliveries in my garage, and that in order to successfully operate this model Chamberlain needs to funnel all users through their proprietary channels in order to fully vet the delivery transaction? Or at least to prevent HA users from nibbling at Chamberlain's lunch with DIY equivalents? Do you think that they will pull back from this move given the pushback?

bluGill 3y ago
For retailers I want someone to verify that they are legitimate. I don't want random people in my garage. If someone enters my garage when I'm not home they better really be agents for WalMart/Amazon/target/UPS (as opposed to WolMort/Amozan/targit/USP...) , and whatever company does that does background checks on drivers. Probably they also need to have other cameras in their vehicles so that drivers trying to steal whatever valuables I have are not stolen. (as already pointed out, most people have an unlocked door from the garage to the house)
- kelnos 3y ago
  > as already pointed out, most people have an unlocked door from the garage to the house Not sure where you live, but every house I've lived in (USA, a few different states) during my entire life has had an exterior-quality door with exterior-quality lock, including deadbolt, between the house and garage. In the one house I lived in that had a security system, that garage-to-interior door was also wired into the system and arming it would treat it like an exterior door. Having said that, I still wouldn't want random delivery people entering my garage without my knowledge.
  - abustamam 3y ago
    I think parent comment was saying the door exists, but many people leave it unlocked. I grew up leaving that garage-interior door open because that's where we put the litter box, at several different houses.
    - SoftTalker 3y ago
      Yep, agree. I only lock the garage interior door when I'll be gone for an extended period of time (more than a few days).
  - thfuran 3y ago
    >every house I've lived in (USA, a few different states) during my entire life has had an exterior-quality door with exterior-quality lock, including deadbolt, between the house and garage. Sure, but I've probably locked it barely more than twice.
  - scottlamb 3y ago
    > Not sure where you live, but every house I've lived in (USA, a few different states) during my entire life has had an exterior-quality door with exterior-quality lock, including deadbolt, between the house and garage. Likewise, but even if it's actually locked, no lock is impenetrable, and a closed garage provides a thief with the privacy to pick it at leisure or even break down the door. Burglary deterrence advice sometimes includes tips like adjusting your landscaping so your front door is visible from the street and locking gates to your back yard. Letting the thief into your garage thoroughly defeats the point of that... Also, I keep stuff (bikes) in the garage that I don't want stolen.
    - godelski 3y ago
      > Also, I keep stuff (bikes) in the garage that I don't want stolen. Most people keep cars in their garage. Which last I checked were usually more expensive than bikes. Joke aside, people keep a lot of valuable stuff in garages. Hell, tool chests can easily be worth thousands of dollars and are easy to pawn.
      - TeMPOraL 3y ago
        This makes me feel like the whole thing is, in large part, meant as complementary product to security cameras. For example Ring cameras, oh so conveniently owned by Amazon.
        godelski 3y ago
        Yeah I think people just aren't getting it and don't understand what all the data does and means. More importantly, I think they can't see that there are other options, which in some/many cases there realistically isn't (hacking your own solution doesn't count. Needs to be unskilled) I've been thinking lately about how quickly the world has changed and I think it's a bit underappreciated. I mean cellphones only became a household item 20 years ago, smart phones about 15. Or closer to home, at least for me, generative models went from barely making small black and white human faces (Goodfellow invented GANs mid 2014) to being able to create some fucking good quality images on consumer hardware in a few minutes (not counting all the prompt engineering required. But unconditional is still pretty good). Not to mention that access to these things isn't homogeneously distributed and so rural and poorer regions tend to get thrown into the deep end rather than wade their way in. I think from that perspective a lot of drama makes sense. Especially when we're talking about how people are not very tech literate. Hell, I have a hard time convincing people in my CS PhD department that hate Facebook's spying to switch to Signal or even switch to FF (we see the same stuff here on HN. More excuses than explanations). If the "friction" (even if 90+% mental) is high among tech experts idk how novices can handle all this. At least with my family they're more willing to believe Facebook's app uses an always listening microphone rather than believe me when I explain that they can figure out you're friends and interested in gardening if you just stand next to someone or walk around with them for 30 minutes in the gardening section of Home Depot ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ (sorry, this took a tangent, but I know you think about some of these things too)
  - dheera 3y ago
    > Not sure where you live, but every house I've lived in (USA, a few different states) during my entire life has had an exterior-quality door with exterior-quality lock, including deadbolt, between the house and garage. I don't know if that would do much. It's one thing to be sawing up a front door that is in plain sight of the street -- passer-bys might call the cops if they saw that. But if you're doing it from inside a garage? You could shut the garage door and saw away. Nobody would report saw noises coming from a garage because that's super normal.
  - LeifCarrotson 3y ago
    My in-laws have this, but mine, my parents, my siblings, my wife's siblings, and my neighbor all have a big window in that door. And none of them are ever locked.
    - sangnoir 3y ago
      How old are those houses? They probably are not compliant with current building codes[1], many places require your garage doors (and ceilings) to have higher fire resistance than the rest of the house. In my experience, fire-resistance correlates to sturdiness in doors. 1. I know it's a broad generalization, also location-dependant
      - bluGill 3y ago
        Latest codes have backed off of that. Doors that can meet the old fire doors had closing springs set so strong the elderly couldn't open them (or couldn't get in with packages after getting it open)
        sangnoir 3y ago
        I don't see anything in your comment that suggests the latest codes have backed from high fire resistance - which was the thrust of the comment you replied to (garage doors have become sturdier, and glass has low fire resistance)
- Nextgrid 3y ago
  But that can be achieved by giving the retailer a one-off access code/secret which will be handed to the delivery driver by the retailer's company? At no point does "preventing random people in your garage" required a greedy middleman in the path between you and whoever you want to give your garage door access code.
  - SoftTalker 3y ago
    Many people already have a keypad mounted outside that will open the garage door. You can set up a guest code there and give to Amazon, or anyone you want. There is zero need for internet-enabled smartness in the garage door opener here.
    - judge2020 3y ago
      Okay, but the adoption rate of "let me create a code for my packages and give it to the Amazon person" is perhaps two or three orders of magnitude lower than if Amazon shows a bunch of call-to-actions for "link your myQ account for secure deliveries".
      - LeifCarrotson 3y ago
        And if Chaimberlain charges Amazon $0.50 per door opened to enable that feature (which steers buyers towards Amazon and away from the manufacturer website, Walmart/target/eBay/random competitor that doesn't have that feature) that might be a bigger, recurring, higher-margin revenue stream than all of Chaimberlain's traditional manufacturing profits. Which would you rather have - $200 revenue for a $100 cost once in 20 years, or $0.50 per week for a few packets of data? They could afford to give away the openers if they could win that revenue stream. And Amazon would dump them in a second if consumers could instead click "Link your Home Assistant for secure deliveries and get $0.30 digital credit". Or more likely, Amazon would throw directly wired Dash buttons at consumers to enable secure deliveries.
        xp84 3y ago
        That sounds plausible in theory, but it's still pretty weird to me though because Home Assistant is exclusively the domain of home automation geeks. There isn't even an off-the-shelf turnkey device to get into the ecosystem, you have to know what computers are (including scary things like "operating system" and "IP address") to even get started. I don't know what Chamberlain has to gain by sticking it to that particular demo. For HA to be a threat to the "partnerships" like Amazon, it would have to have an audience sizeable enough that Amazon would consider incentivizing adoption. I would say it seems dumb to piss off the most passionate fans of home automation when you're a vendor of equipment that such people might want to buy, but Chamberlain has such a stranglehold on the market that I think they figure that even if they royally piss off that 5% of the garage door opener market, those suckers (or their garage door installers) will be forced to buy the gear from them anyway.
- sneak 3y ago
  Background checks don’t ensure trustworthy staff, they just select for only criminals who are slick enough to not get caught doing crime, or criminals who haven’t been caught yet. Their effectiveness is overstated.
- TylerE 3y ago
  Not just agents for, they should be bonded agents. My garage has plenty of valuable items that would be easily fenced. (Power tools, etc).
- jacquesm 3y ago
  The last thing I need is for the people that I do not know to have unchaperoned access to my garage.
SrslyJosh 3y ago
Bold of them to assume that I will trust a stranger with access to my garage.
- staplers 3y ago
  They'll just monopolize garage openers like smart phones and you'll have 2 options both which will be hooked into the surveillance grid.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
jrockway 3y ago
I don't think they care about HA at all, but they do care about Amazon not going through them to get access, and from the API server's perspective, both look identical. Personally, I hope that Amazon doesn't play ball. You can TRY and seek rent from the world's largest retailer, but you need them, they don't need you. My main takeaway is that Amazon should offer a discount to deliver packages to buildings with staff to accept the packages. They never go missing, so less refunds, and the building staff does not charge Amazon to receive packages. The business dynamics are pretty interesting, though. It could be that paying this company reduces missing packages so much that it actually saves Amazon money, which they pass on to consumers in terms of lower prices. Or, it could be that they charge $1 per access, and Amazon passes that on to the customer, and then people are disincentivized from using Amazon. Meanwhile, a competitor (say, Walmart?) brokers a deal where they hide that fee, and take enough customers away from Amazon that Amazon has to play ball (and now the price is $2 per access). Costs go up for everyone. The phenomenon of partnerships like my hypothetical above are very interesting to me. Every so often I check what I can use my credit card rewards points for, and most of the offers, to me, seem like "failing retailer desperately needs a customer" rather than anything I actually want. Thus, the partnerships must be a pretty important tool for companies that are not in first place. Finally, I think about the long term effects of this sort of thing. Everyone wants a % of every transaction. "Oh, you turned your lights on when someone came to deliver a package? Pay the manufacturer of the light bulb $1 and your electric company an extra $1." This will look like "economic growth" to each of those intermediaries, but in the end, they just devalued the dollar. ("Inflation.") We end up with bigger numbers, but actually decrease the amount of "value" floating around.
- TeMPOraL 3y ago
  Curiously in this case, the impetus seems to be a problem that stems primarily from delivery companies squeezing their drivers to near-breaking point. In other words, we're talking about things becoming $1 or $2 more expensive overall, to feed a side industry dedicated to offsetting the negative consequences of exploiting delivery drivers. The only term that comes to my mind here is cancer.

bluGill 3y ago

For retailers I want someone to verify that they are legitimate. I don't want random people in my garage. If someone enters my garage when I'm not home they better really be agents for WalMart/Amazon/target/UPS (as opposed to WolMort/Amozan/targit/USP...) , and whatever company does that does background checks on drivers. Probably they also need to have other cameras in their vehicles so that drivers trying to steal whatever valuables I have are not stolen. (as already pointed out, most people have an unlocked door from the garage to the house)

kelnos 3y ago
> as already pointed out, most people have an unlocked door from the garage to the house Not sure where you live, but every house I've lived in (USA, a few different states) during my entire life has had an exterior-quality door with exterior-quality lock, including deadbolt, between the house and garage. In the one house I lived in that had a security system, that garage-to-interior door was also wired into the system and arming it would treat it like an exterior door. Having said that, I still wouldn't want random delivery people entering my garage without my knowledge.
- abustamam 3y ago
  I think parent comment was saying the door exists, but many people leave it unlocked. I grew up leaving that garage-interior door open because that's where we put the litter box, at several different houses.
  - SoftTalker 3y ago
    Yep, agree. I only lock the garage interior door when I'll be gone for an extended period of time (more than a few days).
- thfuran 3y ago
  >every house I've lived in (USA, a few different states) during my entire life has had an exterior-quality door with exterior-quality lock, including deadbolt, between the house and garage. Sure, but I've probably locked it barely more than twice.
- scottlamb 3y ago
  > Not sure where you live, but every house I've lived in (USA, a few different states) during my entire life has had an exterior-quality door with exterior-quality lock, including deadbolt, between the house and garage. Likewise, but even if it's actually locked, no lock is impenetrable, and a closed garage provides a thief with the privacy to pick it at leisure or even break down the door. Burglary deterrence advice sometimes includes tips like adjusting your landscaping so your front door is visible from the street and locking gates to your back yard. Letting the thief into your garage thoroughly defeats the point of that... Also, I keep stuff (bikes) in the garage that I don't want stolen.
  - godelski 3y ago
    > Also, I keep stuff (bikes) in the garage that I don't want stolen. Most people keep cars in their garage. Which last I checked were usually more expensive than bikes. Joke aside, people keep a lot of valuable stuff in garages. Hell, tool chests can easily be worth thousands of dollars and are easy to pawn.
    - TeMPOraL 3y ago
      This makes me feel like the whole thing is, in large part, meant as complementary product to security cameras. For example Ring cameras, oh so conveniently owned by Amazon.
      - godelski 3y ago
        Yeah I think people just aren't getting it and don't understand what all the data does and means. More importantly, I think they can't see that there are other options, which in some/many cases there realistically isn't (hacking your own solution doesn't count. Needs to be unskilled) I've been thinking lately about how quickly the world has changed and I think it's a bit underappreciated. I mean cellphones only became a household item 20 years ago, smart phones about 15. Or closer to home, at least for me, generative models went from barely making small black and white human faces (Goodfellow invented GANs mid 2014) to being able to create some fucking good quality images on consumer hardware in a few minutes (not counting all the prompt engineering required. But unconditional is still pretty good). Not to mention that access to these things isn't homogeneously distributed and so rural and poorer regions tend to get thrown into the deep end rather than wade their way in. I think from that perspective a lot of drama makes sense. Especially when we're talking about how people are not very tech literate. Hell, I have a hard time convincing people in my CS PhD department that hate Facebook's spying to switch to Signal or even switch to FF (we see the same stuff here on HN. More excuses than explanations). If the "friction" (even if 90+% mental) is high among tech experts idk how novices can handle all this. At least with my family they're more willing to believe Facebook's app uses an always listening microphone rather than believe me when I explain that they can figure out you're friends and interested in gardening if you just stand next to someone or walk around with them for 30 minutes in the gardening section of Home Depot ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ (sorry, this took a tangent, but I know you think about some of these things too)
- dheera 3y ago
  > Not sure where you live, but every house I've lived in (USA, a few different states) during my entire life has had an exterior-quality door with exterior-quality lock, including deadbolt, between the house and garage. I don't know if that would do much. It's one thing to be sawing up a front door that is in plain sight of the street -- passer-bys might call the cops if they saw that. But if you're doing it from inside a garage? You could shut the garage door and saw away. Nobody would report saw noises coming from a garage because that's super normal.
- LeifCarrotson 3y ago
  My in-laws have this, but mine, my parents, my siblings, my wife's siblings, and my neighbor all have a big window in that door. And none of them are ever locked.
  - sangnoir 3y ago
    How old are those houses? They probably are not compliant with current building codes[1], many places require your garage doors (and ceilings) to have higher fire resistance than the rest of the house. In my experience, fire-resistance correlates to sturdiness in doors. 1. I know it's a broad generalization, also location-dependant
    - bluGill 3y ago
      Latest codes have backed off of that. Doors that can meet the old fire doors had closing springs set so strong the elderly couldn't open them (or couldn't get in with packages after getting it open)
      - sangnoir 3y ago
        I don't see anything in your comment that suggests the latest codes have backed from high fire resistance - which was the thrust of the comment you replied to (garage doors have become sturdier, and glass has low fire resistance)
Nextgrid 3y ago
But that can be achieved by giving the retailer a one-off access code/secret which will be handed to the delivery driver by the retailer's company? At no point does "preventing random people in your garage" required a greedy middleman in the path between you and whoever you want to give your garage door access code.
- SoftTalker 3y ago
  Many people already have a keypad mounted outside that will open the garage door. You can set up a guest code there and give to Amazon, or anyone you want. There is zero need for internet-enabled smartness in the garage door opener here.
  - judge2020 3y ago
    Okay, but the adoption rate of "let me create a code for my packages and give it to the Amazon person" is perhaps two or three orders of magnitude lower than if Amazon shows a bunch of call-to-actions for "link your myQ account for secure deliveries".
    - LeifCarrotson 3y ago
      And if Chaimberlain charges Amazon $0.50 per door opened to enable that feature (which steers buyers towards Amazon and away from the manufacturer website, Walmart/target/eBay/random competitor that doesn't have that feature) that might be a bigger, recurring, higher-margin revenue stream than all of Chaimberlain's traditional manufacturing profits. Which would you rather have - $200 revenue for a $100 cost once in 20 years, or $0.50 per week for a few packets of data? They could afford to give away the openers if they could win that revenue stream. And Amazon would dump them in a second if consumers could instead click "Link your Home Assistant for secure deliveries and get $0.30 digital credit". Or more likely, Amazon would throw directly wired Dash buttons at consumers to enable secure deliveries.
      - xp84 3y ago
        That sounds plausible in theory, but it's still pretty weird to me though because Home Assistant is exclusively the domain of home automation geeks. There isn't even an off-the-shelf turnkey device to get into the ecosystem, you have to know what computers are (including scary things like "operating system" and "IP address") to even get started. I don't know what Chamberlain has to gain by sticking it to that particular demo. For HA to be a threat to the "partnerships" like Amazon, it would have to have an audience sizeable enough that Amazon would consider incentivizing adoption. I would say it seems dumb to piss off the most passionate fans of home automation when you're a vendor of equipment that such people might want to buy, but Chamberlain has such a stranglehold on the market that I think they figure that even if they royally piss off that 5% of the garage door opener market, those suckers (or their garage door installers) will be forced to buy the gear from them anyway.
sneak 3y ago
Background checks don’t ensure trustworthy staff, they just select for only criminals who are slick enough to not get caught doing crime, or criminals who haven’t been caught yet. Their effectiveness is overstated.
TylerE 3y ago
Not just agents for, they should be bonded agents. My garage has plenty of valuable items that would be easily fenced. (Power tools, etc).
jacquesm 3y ago
The last thing I need is for the people that I do not know to have unchaperoned access to my garage.

SrslyJosh 3y ago

Bold of them to assume that I will trust a stranger with access to my garage.

staplers 3y ago
They'll just monopolize garage openers like smart phones and you'll have 2 options both which will be hooked into the surveillance grid.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]

jrockway 3y ago

I don't think they care about HA at all, but they do care about Amazon not going through them to get access, and from the API server's perspective, both look identical. Personally, I hope that Amazon doesn't play ball. You can TRY and seek rent from the world's largest retailer, but you need them, they don't need you. My main takeaway is that Amazon should offer a discount to deliver packages to buildings with staff to accept the packages. They never go missing, so less refunds, and the building staff does not charge Amazon to receive packages. The business dynamics are pretty interesting, though. It could be that paying this company reduces missing packages so much that it actually saves Amazon money, which they pass on to consumers in terms of lower prices. Or, it could be that they charge $1 per access, and Amazon passes that on to the customer, and then people are disincentivized from using Amazon. Meanwhile, a competitor (say, Walmart?) brokers a deal where they hide that fee, and take enough customers away from Amazon that Amazon has to play ball (and now the price is $2 per access). Costs go up for everyone. The phenomenon of partnerships like my hypothetical above are very interesting to me. Every so often I check what I can use my credit card rewards points for, and most of the offers, to me, seem like "failing retailer desperately needs a customer" rather than anything I actually want. Thus, the partnerships must be a pretty important tool for companies that are not in first place. Finally, I think about the long term effects of this sort of thing. Everyone wants a % of every transaction. "Oh, you turned your lights on when someone came to deliver a package? Pay the manufacturer of the light bulb $1 and your electric company an extra $1." This will look like "economic growth" to each of those intermediaries, but in the end, they just devalued the dollar. ("Inflation.") We end up with bigger numbers, but actually decrease the amount of "value" floating around.

TeMPOraL 3y ago
Curiously in this case, the impetus seems to be a problem that stems primarily from delivery companies squeezing their drivers to near-breaking point. In other words, we're talking about things becoming $1 or $2 more expensive overall, to feed a side industry dedicated to offsetting the negative consequences of exploiting delivery drivers. The only term that comes to my mind here is cancer.