Privacy

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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

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Haier hits Home Assistant plugin dev with takedown notice (www.bleepingcomputer.com)

submitted 9 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

34 comments fedilink hide all child comments

cross-posted from: https://poptalk.scrubbles.tech/post/567593

Haier hits Home Assistant plugin dev with takedown notice

I'm not really big on "let's make a movement", but this independent dev has been hit with a cease-and-desist from making a FOSS Home Assistant addon for their Haier air conditioners.

Haier claims that they are losing out on millions of dollars due to this plugin which... lets you control their air conditions from home assistant. They haven't bothered to explain how that's possibly worth millions of dollars - they're just claiming it.

So of course they hit the Streisand button and are demanding that he takes it down. He of course is complying... in a couple of days. Maybe you see where this is going.

It would be an absolute shame if any of you just happened to create a fork, or clone the code, or mirror it in your own instance. An absolute shame.

Just so everyone here knows which repositories NOT to clone or fork, here are the two links:

https://github.com/Andre0512/hon

https://github.com/Andre0512/pyhOn

and please, don't repost this anywhere, or share it in other communities, or anything like that. It's a shame that so many people already know and are making clones. I'm just letting you know so you don't do anything like telling others who may make their own copies.

(sidenote: Haier owns GE Appliance, so for our American folks it may affect you folks too)

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[–] [email protected] 40 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Specifically, the plug-ins are using our services in an unauthorized manner, which is causing significant economic harm to our Company.

How does this cause them "significant economic harm?" My immediate thought is they are losing out on data or ads, hence it being a privacy concern.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago

It could be poorly optimized or non-ideally programmatically poking their service.

But instead of working with devs or releasing a real API they did this shit.