GET STARTED WITH A cloud-free smart home

Can you cut the cloud from your smart devices and control your home privately?

Reader Colin Robertson recently contacted us with a concern about connectivity and oversharing. “It feels more and more like an adversarial relationship between consumers and the companies who want to spy on – I mean, serve us,” he writes. “I’m interested in the convenience of video doorbells and thermostats, but all of these solutions involve companies that want to access your data for themselves via the cloud.”

Is removing that a realistic ideal? Those who recall the first wave of X10 devices will remember the way the local smart home once operated, and that’s not something we’re looking to revisit. While it was a more private way to do things, it was plenty clunky; switches and relays forced to carry massive antennae, only the most simplistic operations available, limited central processing that forced you to keep a noisy computer running at all times – it was the convenience and power of the smartphone and the cloud that pulled smart devices out of the doldrums and made them mean something.

Go local

So is it possible to run a local, or at least private, a smart home without losing those modern conveniences? We immediately run into a few big problems with data (see ‘Data gone wild’) and with the core nature of smart home devices: many, if not most of them, are tied inexorably to the cloud. Control passes almost immediately from a typical smart device to a server online, where it’s acted upon and a message is bounced back to, say, your phone to offer an alert, or to another device to tell it to switch on or change a parameter.