Oh wow, this is amazing. There's been a lawsuit in court about someone in Germany who sued their landlord because the landlord has put a Google Nest fire alarm into their flat against their will, ignoring offers by the renter to put in a non-google-non-iot fire alarm at the renter's expense. The landlord won because apparently the court was not convinced that the fire alarm could spy on conversations [1]... What would have happened if Google had secretly put a microphone into their fire alarms as well, not just their home security system?
Yeah so the nest protect is, when you look at it objectively, a ceiling mounted general purpose remote sensing package. It’s basically only lacking a wide angle camera and I suspect that’s because they figured it would cross too far into “creepy” for it to be saleable.
It seems to me like a team sat for a while, looked at all the possible ways they could get people to mount a package like this in every room and settled on calling it a smoke alarm.
At the most optimistic they started with a smoke alarm and gradually realised they could build a general purpose platform based on the hardware being deployed in lots of rooms and many types of sensors being dirt cheap now.
Decided they could enable new capabilities (and data goldmines!) in software later.
It’s a pity there’s not an actually customer controlled version of it.
There's the first alert onelink. May have the same issues though, it has a microphone and an alexa integration. Also support homekit, unlike the Nest Protect.
Are there any best practices for using a device like this but not having it communicate with the wider world? I.e. It can communicate with you via a homekit hub, but can't connect outside your LAN
They don't have to be connected to a network in order to work. The will even happily do self-check without network access - something I realized when I wanted to mute a self-check only to find out that I had done some network changes. Had to use a schtick, like in the old days.
Given that these devices are battery powered and meant to last for years on a single charge you can imagine how often they actually connect to the wireless network. And how much traffic they send.
And again, they work perfectly fine without Internet access. Or network access for that matter. I love them, and as someone with an irrational fear of being in a fire they have helped a lot. They're much more sensitive (without being an issue, due to pre-alarm) than the alternatives.
I assumed you didn't get the push notification since your alarms weren't connected to the network properly.
Do you have a 1st gen? I wonder if they're louder. Mine (2nd gen) test pretty quietly. It's not the full-on alarm shriek. It a a medium-volume beeping and only happens for a couple of seconds.
it wouldn't the case was dismissed, because it's the wrong court.
second it was dismissed because just because it's modern and has several technology that can be missused doesn't mean that it will be missused. in germany you need to actually have evidence to really get something like that dismissed. Especially since the landlord actually also offered that she can use her own fire alarm (when she buys it)
It’s not as if someone is going to experience a false alarm in their own system, accidentally access your system via a giant security failure and random account mangling, while your system is experiencing a real alarm at the same moment, and then unintentionally silence your alarm. The level of coincidence here is absurd.
The alternative concern that Nest is so incompetent that they somehow issue an automatic silence command (either to all alarms or just yours) seems no more plausible than First Alert being so incompetent that your alarm simply doesn’t work. Especially in combination with the fact that this incompetence must either be undetected permanently (i.e. they always silence your alarm and never notice the horrendous bug) or coincidentally tied to an actual fire in your home, this is probably roughly as likely as a meteorite flattening your house.
The only “viable” concern here is to that an attacker might silence your alarm maliciously, which implies a lot of dedication from an enemy, because they are literally trying to murder you. Presumably this enemy is also an arsonist because otherwise there’s likely no alarm to silence and if there is, it’s likely a false alarm.
your landlord will get the notification about carbon monoxide on their phone. Then they will call you. It might be a false alarm twice. Then it might be real the third time but then they decided to not call you and just silence it.
lot's of thing can happen by incompetence, not even have to go too far on the scenarios.
Why would they silence the alarm? It's just a notification on their phone. Silencing doesn't accomplish anything for them.
The first time my landlord silenced a "false alarm", I'd tell them not to ever do that again. The second time, I'd reset the device and register it under an account they don't control.
But yes, I do see your concern now. I was not initially thinking of the landlord actually controlling the device, merely installing and allowing the tenant to control it. There's a lot less ridiculous coincidence required for a landlord to stupidly silence the alarm.
:D in my country, i never saw anyone with an alarm on their house :D maybe the issue is not to remotely silent the alarm, but that it's needed in the first place :D
Fire codes in many developed regions also require working smoke alarms whether the property is rented or owner-occupied.
Add to that the economic incentives involved when you wish to insure you property against fire and liability, or mortgage it (which almost always imposes a requirement to insure the property).
Replying to myself as I can't edit it any more: Apparently it wasn't a fire alarm from google but "Brunata Metrona Funksystem Star" [1]. It is still wirelessly connected though, not to the internet but to a ground station in the house, outside of the flats of the renters. Then once per year the station is read out by someone who connects a cable to it.
to be fair it was silly that this was handeld at the BVerfG.
In now way could that be a "verfassungsproblematische" entscheidung.
I mean the person argued, that the lower court argued wrongly about his informational self-determination which is stupid because the person had the chance to buy her own fire alarm (on her own expenses).
Read it again. The landlord refused to buy it, not that the renter could not use it:
> 1. Der Beschwerdeführer wurde von der Vermieterin (im Folgenden: Klägerin) seiner - in einem Mehrfamilienhaus gelegenen - Wohnung auf Duldung des Einbaus von Rauchwarnmeldern in Anspruch genommen. Er lehnte das von der Klägerin ausgesuchte Gerät ab, weil es nicht lediglich dem Brandschutz diene, sondern mittels Ultraschallsensoren und Infrarottechnologie dazu geeignet sei, Bewegungsprofile von Personen zu erstellen, die sich in der Wohnung aufhielten. Sogar die Aufzeichnung von in der Wohnung geführten Gesprächen sei technisch möglich. Der Beschwerdeführer bot der Klägerin an, auf eigene Kosten ein einfacheres, ohne Funktechnik ausgestattetes Modell in seiner Wohnung zu installieren. Dazu war die Klägerin unter Hinweis auf die Vorzüge des von ihr gewählten Gerätetyps nicht bereit. Das Funksystem diene lediglich dem Zweck, eine Fernwartung sämtlicher im Haus befindlicher Geräte über ein im Hausflur installiertes Steuerungsgerät zu ermöglichen.
Yeah, the landlord refused to buy it, but instead wanted to install the wirelessly controlled fire alarm. Surely the renter could buy it for themselves but then there'd be two alarms, one bought by the landlord and one by the renter. The question was about the alarm the landlord installed.
The right to "informational self-determination" (ugly translation from German, sorry) relates as much to things you do not want to do/use/provide as it relates to things you want.
Read it again. The renter offered to install their preferred solution on their own cost, instead of the owners preference. The owner refused, insisting on having the one they picked.
[1]: https://www.bundesverfassungsgericht.de/SharedDocs/Entscheid...