Smart Home Isn’t Yours Anymore

Smart devices and ownership. According to the New York Times, one frustrated homeowner, Paul Whelan, has become the face of a much larger struggle over who really controls the technology in our homes. Whelan simply wanted to open and close his garage door with his phone without routing everything through a company server. But Chamberlain's MyQ system insisted on doing exactly that and later shut down third party support, pushing users toward subscription. So he built his own device. R A T G D O Rage against the garage door opener. That's what it stands for. He thought he'd sell 100 or so. He sold tens of thousands. Whelan argues that consumers are losing control of the hardware they buy, whether through remote shutdowns, surprise subscriptions, or software changes that remove features after purchase. Advocates say the solution starts with right to repair laws and reforms to outdated copyright rules that shield companies from accountability. And for consumers, the advice is simple. Buy devices that work offline and keep your data and your home under your control. Okay, what's the real message here? Technology companies are getting out of control. You think you're buying something from them, but oh no, you use it a month or two and all of a sudden it doesn't work anymore unless you pay them a subscription. This is bait and switch. And yes, it is time for big government to step in and put an end to it. Let's go a little deeper here. Look, there are some services that have a device component, but it cost the company more to do it. It's providing value and I don't mind paying for it. Look, maybe we all pay too much for our phone, but I, I bought a phone. I kind of understand I have to pay a regular monthly fee, but for a garage door, that seems bizarre. Now, the company mentioned is called MyQ, which I believe is what my own new garage door is on. And so far it's working with the opener. I don't use an app for it, and I really don't want to have to give a subscription. Now, I don't let people into my garage door when I'm away. So I don't even know why I'd want an app, but certainly some people would, and it just seems excessive. Here's the challenge we all face. If you are a CEO of a company and you say, I'm going to create a product and it's going to be the Yamaha piano, I'm going to sell it once at a fair price, make money, make my clients happy, and maybe they'll pass along the word to friends and family who also want to buy a Yamaha piano that worked for hundreds of years. Maybe not with that company, but in general, that was the basic positioning of capitalism. You create a product, you sell it once for a fair fee. That's all the profit you get. Well, as you may have noticed, tech companies don't work like that. That's why you don't see people who start piano companies becoming trillionaires or centibillionaires. But you do see people who start tech companies like Marc Bezos and, and Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk. That's why they become center billionaires and almost trillionaires. They create products that people get hooked on and then pay every month forever. And okay, if I've got to pay Netflix every month or they cut it off, I get it. That's a pure streaming service. Garage door opener. Now, I actually bought a ring. This is an Aura ring that tracks your sleep. And I've been very pleased with it. I've had it now, I guess about five years. But what I did notice is my friends and colleagues I recommended it to, who bought it a year later, became very disenchanted with it. Why? Because if you bought it a year later, it stopped working unless you gave a monthly subscription fee to Aura. So your ring essentially became disabled. Now that's great for the stock owners and the investors in Aura. Recurring revenue. Everybody wants recurring revenue. I get it, okay? I have some memberships for my own digital clone, which you'll see advertised in a moment. So, hey, I'm a part of that, but I'm upfront about it. It says you pay monthly, so I think you've got to be upfront about it. And there's got to be some difference between an actual tangible physical object and some sort of cloud service. Right now, for example, there's a problem with printers. Printers are making devices that essentially stop your device if you don't pay up for an ink subscription. That seems odd. Google's old Nest thermostats need open source software to keep working. They won't just keep working on what you paid for. Ifixits gives some advice. Choose dumb refrigerators, dishwashers and coffee makers. Look, I love the Internet as much as the next guy, the next person. I'm using it. Now. We're streaming live on one phone here to TikTok. I'm streaming live now to Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitch, Rumble, X, you name it. I love technology. But when I went down this morning to my kitchen at 5am to make some coffee, I opened the refrigerator. I didn't need the Internet telling me, low on milk. I can see their milk is right there. I didn't need the Internet connected to my coffee machine telling me, oh, your beans will run out in three days. I looked and I saw that the thing holding the coffee beans was low. So I put some more beans in. I do think all of us need to question just randomly buying technology. I'm all in favor of technology, but we don't need technology in everything. Maybe I'll be proven wrong. Maybe three years from now I'll be saying, can't imagine I ever had a refrigerator that didn't have an Internet connection, telling me when everything expired and what I'm short on. How do people live like that back in the day? It's possible. But for right now, I'm going to take a stance pretty firmly that there are multiple, multiple products in your home, in your office, in your life that you can simply buy and use the product without an Internet connection, without giving the manufacturer the ability to make your product worthless. Because that's what happens. You're buying something, you think you own it. In the case of my ring, I believe it was about 300, 350 bucks. You think you own it, you think it's going to do something and then you find out later, no, not really worth anything unless you give me money every single month. Now, some companies are very clever the way they do that. You know, just the other day I was having some work done on my cell phone and all of a sudden it wouldn't work because I used up all the storage. And, you know, it's my fault like everyone else. I take too many pictures, too many videos. But I'm thinking, am I really going to block out an entire day to go through delete, delete, delete. Oh, that one I like. And yeah, Apple got me for another $9 a month for cloud service storage for my phone. So it is a creeping, creeping problem. I don't think it can be avoided for some things like cell phones. But garage doors, your dog collar, a printer, a basic tracker, these are things where consumers do need some rights or at least opt out rights. And certainly there needs to be fuller disclosure. Someone selling you a product needs to be able to say, by the way, these features I'm giving you now, you might not have unless you start giving me a lot more money in a month or two. So really think twice about it. There needs to be some stronger provisions helping customers, you and me.