Anyone else get this email from Leviton about their decora light switches and their changes to ToS expressly permitting them to collect and use behavioral data from your devices?
FUCK Leviton, long live Zigbee and Zwave and all open-sourced standards
My Leviton
At Leviton, we’re committed to providing an excellent smart home experience. Today, we wanted to share a few updates to our Privacy Policy and Terms of Service. Below is a quick look at key changes:
We’ve updated our privacy policy to provide more information about how we collect, use, and share certain data, and to add more information about our users’ privacy under various US and Canadian laws. For instance, Leviton works with third-party companies to collect necessary and legal data to utilize with affiliate marketing programs that provide appropriate recommendations. >As well, users can easily withdraw consent at any time by clicking the links below.
The updates take effect March 11th, 2024. Leviton will periodically send information regarding promotions, discounts, new products, and services. If you would like to unsubscribe from communications from Leviton, please click here. If you do not agree with the privacy policy/terms of service, you may request removal of your account by clicking this link.
For additional information or any questions, please contact us at [email protected].
Traduction française de cet email Leviton
Copyright © 2024 Leviton Manufacturing Co., Inc., All rights reserved. 201 North Service Rd. • Melville, NY 11747
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Seems to be more on the web side of things for affiliate marketing, not necessarily light switch usage patterns? At least the pasted/quoted bit doesn’t suggest that it’d cover interactions with the devices.
It's any of their products that utilize their app or web servers to work. Here's their ToS, and below is a snippet:
And their privacy policy:
and section 3:
Cool. So don’t use their app. I’d imagine HomeAssistant usage cannot be tracked as it wouldn’t go through their app.
FWIW, I’m all in on HomeKit, so I only control over Home app for my light switches from another vendor, and I’ve got no skin in the game with Leviton, but same idea applies. No vendor apps means their app based tracking are much less relevant.
These devices are home-polling, which means commands/info is managed through WAN and their home servers.
Even if you don't use their app, it still uses their servers.
FWIW, i also use home assistant. But some of the devices I have were not choices I made, so it's a slow trudge replacing them all with locally-managed devices.
You can use these devices with HomeKit and firewall then off from the internet so they can no longer phone home. I have mine brought into home assistant with the HomeKit controller integration and it’s on a WiFi network with no connection to the outside world. The downside is that it can’t receive a firmware update.
Can’t wait for Matter and Thread become more mainstream. Local first (and device level egress blocked by VLAN) for the win.