Dan Fixes Coin-Ops3d ago

I got a bunch more motion sensors and I've been putting them around the house so I can program Home Assistant to do stuff like turn off lights in rooms that aren't being used, turn on lights when we're going downstairs with hands full of laundry, obviously just flipping a switch is easy but in some rooms the switch is on the opposite side of the wall and if I put a button on the entry-side then I don't trip over the cat, telling the water heater to get hot before we shower, having a $10 smart plug tell me when my 80's washing machine has finished, having a button to make the lights go cosy, y'know just nice helpful stuff that I do because I like making the house better for my spouse and kid and as I was putting up all these motion sensors I was thinking,

man,

there's NOTHING in this program to detect when it's being used for evil

And like there really should be? Like someone could legit fucking torment their family with this, this could be used as a tool of manipulation and control and fostering the abusive sort of dependence

And then I think of how me and spouse are moving away from google and onto like self-hosted stuff, nextcloud and searxng and xmpp and shit like that, and I can't help but think, *know* really, that right now there's someone controlling their intimate partner with those same technologies, like something that's supposed to be liberating you from corporate-style General Abuse is being leveraged towards a form of very focused abuse against you specifically by someone on whom you depend

I don't think enough software devs spend enough time thinking about how their projects can be used to hurt people

Has anyone smarter than me written any long posts thinking about this and what we can do about it

Show threademily, blinkenlight witch
@ifixcoinops I'm... not sure you *can* do anything about it without compromising usefulness for people who aren't assholes?

like, I've been on both sides of this, I had an abusive parent as a teenager, and now I'm an adult with a partner who does a lot less touching-the-house-computers than I do, so I am acutely aware of how much of a terrible person I theoretically *could* be in this situation

if home-assistant started removing features because some people are using them nefariously, I expect they will quickly be readded as third party plugins, and now it's the same situation except that if I need that feature for something I have to increment the download count on some code maintained by an abusive asshole
Mar 28 at 10:35pmWeb
Show threademily, blinkenlight witch3d ago
@ifixcoinops imo the one thing we can do here is make single-user stuff the default (and easy for normal people to set up)

I don't know my partner's passwords and don't want to. I cannot read any of my friends' fedi DMs because they're not stored in my single user instance's database, why the hell would they be

idk what that even looks like for home automation though
Show threadrobryk3d ago
@emily @ifixcoinops

Another approach that mitigates the issue is sharing infrastructure with friends, but not ones you live with. Then the potential for abuse is split, and potential for abuse of infrastructure you use by people you live with is even lower than for single-user instances, because of lack of physical access.

Which abuse avenues via home automation do you think are most important? Ones where abuser uses it to spy, or ones where they command it to directly abuse and/or gaslight, or something else?
Show threademily, blinkenlight witch3d ago
@robryk @ifixcoinops imo there isn't a single widely applicable right answer to that. it's situational, in that the most important problems to solve in any category are the ones one actually has