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Comment by driverdan | Hacker News Reader

> I think any software engineer with some industry experience will absolutely NOT install a device in his home that receives automatic updates

Have you ever talked to another SE? The majority I know don't even care about privacy and have all kinds of invasive auto update devices in their homes (Alexa, Nest, Ring, etc).

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Same, most of the tech people I know have no aversion to these things, plus Chrome, Facebook, stock Android or other Google products. It makes me sad that the people who should be pushing against the death of the free internet don't give a shit. At this point I've accepted that Firefox will be going away at some point in the not-so-distant future, but somebody will have to pry it from my cold dead hands.

> Same, most of the tech people I know have no aversion to these things, plus Chrome, Facebook, stock Android or other Google products.

I have an aversion to all of the above. But when it comes to Android, it feels like the options are very limited. Either use iOS and only be able to use the device the way they want you to (for a steep price), or use Android and be tracked like crazy. As for Google products, YouTube is lacking competitors, I use YouTube vanced and NewPipe, but those aren't available everywhere.

It seems like the options really suck right now if you want to participate in the modern world with even some of the comforts that are available.

With Android you can also get much better privacy by trumping most of the Google services, using Firefox with Ublock Origin and a system such as Blokada for system level adblocker.

With Android if you know what you are doing, you can stop a lot of it much better compared to iOS. With Apple the defaults are better than Android but many of the options for blocking trackers are not available.

Can confirm, blokada is an excellent adblocker, although it doesn't have as many granular features as ublock.

Classic HN bubble thinking from OP. I only hear these IoT complaints on HN and Twitter. I'm in the same boat as you, most devs I know have smart home devices and don't give two shits about any privacy issues.

There is a huge disconnect between what you read about online and the real world. Even my conspiracy friends that talk endlessly about Big Tech and their harvesting of data use all the Big Tech things without putting in even the minimal amount of effort to protect their data.

I don't care about privacy that much. But that's also unrelated to the reason I will never have a light switch that's capable of having software updates.

The functionality I want from a light switch is simple enough that it should be able to be built into a finished product. More complexity means more failure modes.

Have you checked out Shelly relays? They can run as simply or complicated as you want. No internet required if you just want to trigger it with a schedule or a webhook over the LAN. The basic logic in the webui was enough to let me run my shop air compressor for 1 hour after the trigger button is pressed and with another option enabled, it won't come back on after a power outage.

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