I haven't done a lot of home automation, but I did set up some Amazon Dash buttons to play some music on our house speakers, which was fun. When Amazon discont

I haven't done a lot of home automation, but I did set up some Amazon Dash buttons to play some music on our house speakers, which was fun. When Amazon discontinued them and actively pushed an update to brick the devices, it was a nice inexpensive wake-up call to not trust phone-home IoT devices. Sometimes the phone-home comes in the guise of over-the-air updates that are supposedly good for security or add features. But sometimes they actually remove features. I think the author of this article has it right — the best security and most trustworthy IoT setup is to host it yourself; never connect things to the internet at large. If your gizmo doesn't support that mode of operation, don't buy it.