homeassistant

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Home Assistant is open source home automation that puts local control and privacy first. Powered by a worldwide community of tinkerers and DIY enthusiasts. Perfect to run on a Raspberry Pi or a local server. Available for free at home-assistant.io

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How do I get phone notifications from my server while I'm not connected to my home network? (lemm.ee)

submitted 4 days ago by [email protected] to c/homeassistant

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Hey guys. Im running Home Assistant in docker container for few years and I'm super happy with it. The only way I access my server when not home is wireguard VPN. I noticed that I'm still receiving notifications even when not connected to VPN. I wonder how is that possible?

I don't have sub for HA Cloud or Nabu Casa. I also don't own a domain, using duckdns for wireguard connection and reverse proxy (npm). I thought I have 100% local setup, but I guess there is a Google or HA server in between. I don't want to disable the feature, I just want to know where is my data being sent

Thx

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[–] [email protected] 25 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (14 children)

Notifications go through Google Firebase servers. This is documented here: https://companion.home-assistant.io/docs/notifications/notification-details/. Your HA server sends the notification to Google, which then sends it to your phone. They don't store the notification they just relay it.

Most mobile apps do something like this. One reason is to improve battery life - your phone can have a single connection to a Google server instead of every app needing its own separate connection.

There used to be a way to use local notifications (meaning you have to be on the same network, either locally or via a VPN), but I can't find the setting any more so maybe it's gone now. (edit: this is still possible)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago (1 children)

It definitely threw me the first time I was out of the house.
I decided the best solution was just to limit alerts to non-sensitive things.
While I'm generally very big on privacy, I really don't give a monkeys if Apple/Google is relaying a message that says "Cat in garden!"

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago

You can enable a persistent connection to get alerts directly without relaying them through Google, but then you need to have a connection to your Home Assistant server all the time (eg by using a VPN or by exposing it publicly)

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