Today’s story is about Philips Hue by Signify. They will soon start forcing accounts on all users and upload user data to their cloud. For now, Signify says you’ll still be able to control your Hue lights locally as you’re currently used to, but we don’t know if this may change in the future. The privacy policy allows them to store the data and share it with partners.
I’m not going to create an account. What I will be doing is looking for an alternative setup that is simple and completely local or just go back to traditional led bulbs.
This is easy for me with just one room using Hue. I feel for those who have them for all or most lighting around their home.
Home Assistant on a Raspberry Pi with a Zigbee dongle and zigbe2mqtt. Your Hue bulb will work just fine. You can even mix them with Ikea / Aqara / Ali / Tuya stuff if you'd like.
A raspberry pi4, Home Assistant software, a zigbee dongle, and any zigbee-compatible smart bulb.
By default, the traffic never leaves your local network, and all your smart-crap still works if the internet goes out. At one point, it had a learning curve like a brick wall, but over the last year or two, they've done a spectacular job of improving the user experience. it's still not perfect, but it's far better than the commercial alternatives and won't harvest your entire life for metadata it can sell.