The outrage continues over Insteon’s apparent shutdown, leaving customers without the ability to use the company’s smart home hub to control light dimmers and other switches.
Ethicists and legals experts weighed in on Wednesday after the problems first surfaced April 14 resulting in hundreds of comments on Reddit and other user boards calling for a class action lawsuit or other remedy. Many commenters shared tech workarounds, although some reported their hub devices were bricked and unusable, cutting off the ability to control dozens of smart home devices.
Officials at Smartlabs, parent company of Insteon and Smarthome, could not be reached to comment on the outages, while Smartlabs President Rob Lilleness told Fierce Electronics in a brief message, “Unfortunately, I’m no longer involved with the company.”
Separately, iHome, a trademark of SDI Technologies, shut down its iHome app and iHome cloud service on April 2 leaving some experts to wonder if the later Insteon shutdown is the start of an unfortunate pattern.
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Some experts pointed the blame for the Insteon fiasco at over-reliance on cloud services and fragmented proprietary technologies, while others said tech buyers must beware with legal issues at play.
“Shutting down a cloud service without notice such as Insteon has allegedly done creates more than just inconvenience for their customers,” said Shubha Ghosh, a Syracuse University College of Law professor.
“A trusted service, like heat or electricity, is lost as people who rely on access to information, the lifeblood of our economy, are denied a necessity. Legislatures and policymakers need to address this matter of critical concern,” he added.
Johannes Himmelreich, a professor at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse, argued that the Insteon episode illustrates “consumers are like guinea pigs with an addiction.” His work focuses on ethics of emerging technology and data science.
Himmelreich said most customers don’t realize their vacuum, doorbell or camera system are “so dependent on cloud software…Without open standards and interoperability, consumers pay the price of innovation. Buying from startups is like an investment, just without the benefits. You place a bet that the people you buy from survive in the market. But if they don’t, that’s on you.”
Theoretically, if the Insteon hub were interoperable with many other products on the market, it would not matter too much if a cloud server supporting it went out. But innovators tend to build new products that are not interoperable to be able to take advantage of the first mover to market, partly in hopes that their proprietary approach will be adopted by others. Standards bodies also require companies to agree on interoperable approaches. Working out the details can take years.
An emerging smart home interoperability standard called Matter is supported by Apple, Google, Amazon and others in the Connectivity Standards Alliance. It is important that large, secure companies are involved, according to some experts.
“Microsoft, Google, Apple and others are gigantic and very unlikely to just go away,” said Jack Gold, an analyst at J. Gold Associates. “Consumers automatically assume that companies they deal with and put their trust in, especially for something like running the whole house, will be around forever…The truth is there are many companies out there on the edge financially that could cease operations without warning. Buyers should do their homework on companies they rely on if they won’t want to be surprised.”
Gold also said consumers need a backup strategy, something that IT departments do when they diversity their suppliers.
“There is a lesson in this shutdown,” Gold said. “Consumers really need to have a backup strategy if they want to make sure they never lose their service. We’re not talking about regulated services like cable or electricity that aren’t allowed to fail. We’re mostly talking about startups, not all of which are funded or run well. If it’s mission critical to you, you need to have a backup plan."
Leonard Lee, an analyst and managing director at NeXt Curve, said cloud-based services in many smart home automation systems provide device provisioning, security credentialing, data storage and sharing and other features. "By design, these systems assume that data, controls and system configurations are going to be centrally administered which presents a security risk to the buyer when the service provider, in this case Insteon, practically goes out of business or decides to discontinue a service," he said via email.
"There is merit in in standalone systems that are designed with what NeXt Curve calls a Privacy First architecture that promotes designs that put the power and data in the hands of the homeowner," Lee added.
Himmelreich has a deeper concern about smart home technology, arguing that it can subject users to surveillance. "Consumers open the most intimate aspects of their lives to surveillance and at the same time become dependent on cloud technology outside of their home," he said via email. "It's a deeply ironic relationship of dependence and exploitation, especially in the U.S. where privacy is largely unprotected by the law."