this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2023
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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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I went all in on Z-wave about 15 years ago (when it was the hottest game in town.) Both Z-wave and Zigbee are "non-routable" protocols, which means they can't talk to anything not joined to their local radio mesh networks. That isolation guarantees they're perfectly behaved local devices.
WiFi devices offer no such guarantees. Anything connected to your IP network has the potential to contact a cloud server. So the same restrictions don't apply to hubs like the Phillips Hue Bridges, which can (and do) communicate to their company's cloud servers, unless you do some fancy networking configurations to isolate them.
I don't attach any proprietary hubs to my radio network. Instead, I have a ZOOZ Z-wave USB stick in my HomeAssistant server, which serves as the hub for the Z-wave network. For Zigbee, I have a SkyConnect USB dongle, which also can not send traffic outside of the local network.
Just like the non-routable radio protocols, USB devices don't have access to a network. The only way they can violate your trust is if you run proprietary software on the host that contacts the cloud on their behalf. So I don't do that.
I trust Home Assistant to not communicate to the cloud unless I explicitly configure a connection. (You'll find many of the 3rd party WiFi device integrations depend upon cloud hosted APIs; Home Assistant does not hide this from you.)