Any IOT device that requires the cloud for functionality is a trap.
I bought a Miku baby monitor specifically because of the 2 devices that offered a feature I wanted, Miku had no subscription fees. And they advertised that they never would. It cost $400.
Then they went bankrupt and during bankruptcy they sent out a proposal to start charging for previously free features. Then they retracted that proposal. Not sure if the judge shut that down, or what happened. But then they sold to a company conveniently created the day of the sale.
Within a month the new company forced out an over the air update that disabled most functionality until you pay them $10 a month (they went bankrupt in the first place because they did a normal over the air firmware update that bricked every single unit and had to replace them all).
Last time I checked they were still being advertised on Amazon as being subscription free.
Honestly I think we need regulation to force companies to purchase a bond to provide basic security and support for any IOT devices they sell for some number of years from the purchase date. I don’t see any sign of the market solving this anytime soon.
I had an internet connected baby monitor. In the end we decided to just get a local RF one and it is a far better experience. Pair it once, and it just works. Lower power. Very reliable. Coverage throughout the house without issue. No apps to crash in the background. No dropped streams. No needing to log in to the app. No worries about features getting taken away. No subscriptions. No having to send data out to the cloud just to pull it back down. Lower latency. Far easier to just hand the display unit to the baby sitter instead of trying to talk them into installing an app and sharing a login.
These days the local RF ones are very solid. Modern DECT-based systems use encryption and frequency hopping so once paired you're not realistically going to get someone listening in.
The only benefit I see for these cloud connected cameras is if you're out of the house and are going to check in on the baby sitter, but in the end I'm not even a big fan of that feature. There's tons of pros for the local RF ones and few negatives, and mostly a bunch of unknowns and concerns with the cloud ones.
My wife works nights and she likes to be able to check in occasionally. It’s also got a millimeter wave radar that shows a breathing graph.
My wife is a pediatric ER doctor and she thinks the breath tracking radar is stupid, but I like to be able to look over and see the graph because I’m a crazy person and otherwise I’d zoom in on the camera and stare at it until I see movement.
We went with an Owlet sock that we got pre-nerfing from the FDA to track breathing/O2. The internet connected monitor was actually the Owlet cam. It worked decently enough, but just headaches from it being a cloud connected camera pushed us to get an RF-based system when we wanted a second camera.
If it works for you, that's great. I'm not trying to yuck your yum, just sharing my own personal experiences.
It used to lol! But it’ll be a cold day in hell before I pay to use the thing I already bought.
We’re about to have our next baby and I have no idea what solution we’ll end up with. I might end up trying to hack the Miku. I used to be an embedded software guy long ago.
I recently bought a baby monitor - or more specifically, spent a couple hundred € on Ubiquity hardware - two cameras, NVR/host, and a PoE switch - and made one myself, because that's the only way I know of (after serious research and asking on HN) one can buy a wifi-enabled baby cam in Europe, that doesn't route video through some sketchy cloud. Baby cam vendors, fuck you all very much.
Especially that it was a new company deliberately disabling the devices, it sounds like a straightforward criminal CFAA violation. Of course, such laws are really only for persecuting little guys doing uppity things like trying to make scientific knowledge available to the public. Even if you could convince any six-degrees-of-golf-buddies prosecutor to take the case, I'm sure the malicious crackers have some fake contract to hide behind that claims a transferable right to remotely destroy your property.
I wonder if you could take them to small claims court. That's a potentially useful remedy, although pretty much everywhere, if they lose in small claims they can appeal it to regular civil court and make it prohibitively expensive to fight them.
I bought a Miku baby monitor specifically because of the 2 devices that offered a feature I wanted, Miku had no subscription fees. And they advertised that they never would. It cost $400.
Then they went bankrupt and during bankruptcy they sent out a proposal to start charging for previously free features. Then they retracted that proposal. Not sure if the judge shut that down, or what happened. But then they sold to a company conveniently created the day of the sale.
Within a month the new company forced out an over the air update that disabled most functionality until you pay them $10 a month (they went bankrupt in the first place because they did a normal over the air firmware update that bricked every single unit and had to replace them all).
Last time I checked they were still being advertised on Amazon as being subscription free.
Honestly I think we need regulation to force companies to purchase a bond to provide basic security and support for any IOT devices they sell for some number of years from the purchase date. I don’t see any sign of the market solving this anytime soon.