Is the official aqara app safe? That is, is there no spyware in it?
First of all, welcome to the Homey Community!
To make sure you are aware of the forum rules, please read the Welcome to the forum! post here.
There is a topic for this app. [APP] Aqara & Xiaomi Smart Home - A different kind of Smart Home solution (Zigbee App)
And why are you asking?
Maybe ask the developer?
Thank you for the welcome.
Naturally, I’m asking as I don’t want to be spied on. It’s not a secret that many Chinese companies spy on their users, even big ones such as lenovo. I was wondering if homey could prevent this from happening in their own app-ecosystem.
I will try ask the developer, thank you.
Zigbee does not need other connections than between controller and device.
And the App code is while not officially public available possible to check on Homey.
Also cloud apps like Tuya, but also fe NetAtmo and many others probably don’t have Spyware in Homey. But All communications are done using the servers of that company.
It is just Who you trust.
Zigbee doesn’t need other connections, but there is nothing obstructing the app from doing other things I presume? Yes, for cloud apps you have to trust the company. I think European companies are easier to trust with this, because of GDPR etc.
Okay, maybe I’ll download it and check it on the homey.
The question is what are you afraid of? Even if there is some kind of tracking (which is extremely unlikely) you could just put homey in a separate vlan and block all internet traffic. And further if it had some kind of backdoor, the only thing it could do is read out some arbitrary sensor values like temperatures or movement. And this without any idea of where you live, doesn’t look like really any valuable information to me.
True, but what about Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon and who knows what?
Maybe this is what you were looking for:
https://legal.athom.com/?document=privacy-policy&language=en
1 Like
Those are probably worse than the CCP indeed😂
