Google has always harvested data. Which I’m generally not a fan of and try to keep as much of it as private as I can. But this whole Gemini thing is egregious. The one and only thing I ever use Google Assistant for his voice commands for home automation. I really need to set up the built-in one for home assistant etc. And Gemini has been absolutely fail-tastic when it comes to taking over those duties. I’ve had to disable it on a number of family devices which suddenly stopped being able to work with a few of the smart home devices around the house.
Going forward I’m heavily investing in matter/threads. The day I can have everything handled locally and not need to rely on proprietary constantly enshitifying bullshit. That will be a great day indeed.
Oh absolutely. I’ve already run it for years with a mixed hodgepodge of zigbee Z-Wave and Wi-Fi devices. The problem is that many still phone home to somewhere. I definitely want to get everything down to matter and threads on my local ha as much as possible.
Was looking at good options the other day for a thread border router. My father was an ESP based option. Though not the ubiquitous cheat esp32s