Smart Home Troubles
Readers of my book, My Smart Home for Seniors, will be interested in this.
I have a fairly high-tech smart home setup, as you might expect. But here’s the thing about smart home tech: it’s all linked to servers in the cloud, and when those servers go offline, your smart home gets pretty dumb.
As a good example, last night there were issues with Wink, whose hub I use to control the Cree smart lights in our living room. (I use Philips Hue for lighting elsewhere in my house.) For whatever reason, Wink had server issues (all local commands go up through the Internet to Wink’s cloud servers, then back down again to the individual devices) which put its services offline. The result was that we could no longer turn our living room lights on or off with our Amazon Echo device or the Wink mobile app. So, horror of horrors, we had to switch all the lights on and off manually.
Now, that isn’t a big thing, but fortunately I didn’t have any other devices connected to the Wink hub. Other users lost control over their smart door locks, doorbells, security systems, garage doors, thermostats, and the like. And, given that the Wink company itself is rumored to be on less than secure financial footing, what do you do when your entire smart home backbone goes dark? This, my friends, is the unspoken downside of the smart home, where every device in your home becomes akin to a dumb terminal reliant on a central server. We have ceded local control, and that may not be a good thing.
Fortunately, Wink was back up and running when we woke up this morning, so it’s back to saying “Alexa, turn on the living room lights.” But for how long? And what happens the next time Wink (or Amazon) has issues? Damn technology.
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