Dan Fixes Coin-Ops2d 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 threadkelp

@ifixcoinops

not sure if i agree, it's just another tool, usable for both good and evil

and as far as "software used for evil", as terrible as this is to admit, even among open source projects, domestic abuse is pretty tame

predator drones run linux, after all. My professional software career lasted for all of a year and i know for a fact that CPUs running my code have killed people. (router manufacturer, def did not five off obvious "we're gonna kill peeps" vibes)

I do agree that devs should absolutely think more about their impact. Far too many people dead set on the engineering, almost nobody asks if they *should*.

all of that aside, what would even be the solution? spying on HA users would just bring us back to square one (or worse).

I don't have an answer, just a bunch of frustrating parallels between this and other similar arguments

Mar 29 at 12:00amWeb