3 ms·
A dozen years ago, I designed and architected a "smart lock", back when that was a thing. Anyway... one of the most important features that we didn't advertise
by nanolith 3y ago
A dozen years ago, I designed and architected a "smart lock", back when that was a thing. Anyway... one of the most important features that we didn't advertise was the ability to use it without registering with the Internet service. It could be used entirely in offline mode. In fact, in most cases, you could use this device without it ever connecting to the Internet.
I think that consumers should have a choice, and they should only need to connect to additional services or a subscription model if there are useful reasons to do so. Most consumers simply do not need their "smart lock" to phone home. If you wanted to do more interesting things, like issue temporary keys to run an Airbnb, then sure, it makes financial sense to pay a small subscription fee. But, most folks just want a little convenience.
Of course, it helps that I'm generally distrusting of businesses and of how behaviors will change after my departure. If you want your products to be ethical, the ethics must be built in from the beginning.
- squeaky-clean 3y agoI work at a place that does smart locks (for businesses though) and my first question to them during the interview was what happens when the internet is out. Thankfully they thought of that and it can even be taken offline permanently after the first time setup. What I heard from other people in the industry is that when Facebook had that huge multi-day outage, it was partly because their smart locks couldn't open externally without an internet connection, and it was relying on Facebook's DNS which was the source of the huge outage.
- nanolith 3y agoI had long and contentious arguments about this. It really opened my eyes to how little innovators really think about these problems. From the beginning, I was concerned about ensuring that our product fails safe, that we had good ESD protection, that our encryption protocols were industry standard, and that we went through third party security auditing. As I liked to say, I wanted to build a product that I'd feel confident about giving to my grandmother. She should be able to use it even if she lacks familiarity with current technology, and I should feel that she's safer for having it.
- squeaky-clean 3y agoI have similar feelings, except I joined after those arguments happened. After working in ad-tech I wanted to move into a job where I didn't feel guilty about what I was building. It wasn't even particularly invasive ad-tech, but still F&$# ads. I don't want to name my company mainly so my coworkers don't learn my HN account, but basically every product feature involves a consultation with a very well known white hat hacker.
- WWLink 3y agoThe Schlage lock I bought in 2015 works like that, it just uses z-wave iirc. I originally paired it with a wink hub until they went to crap, then moved it over to a hubitat elevation hub. Yeeah... should've gone with a raspberry pi and a z-wave dongle... well whatever lol. The lock still works fantastically well. I admit the new ones with homekit support are way slicker because you can set it up so it unlocks if you hold a paired apple watch up to it. That's slick dude. Hella slick!