I've been doing home automation for a long time. I just got a house that I own that I'm excited to jazz out.
That said, I built up an ideology that any automation added should never replace physical items. All automation should have physical kill switches. Any occupants of the home should have appropriate access to things that you would normally give them physical access to.
I implemented walking lights successfully in my old house by replacing switches and doing some neat presence detection (near-field and general) tricks. That mode could be turned off at the front of the house, and frankly I found myself using it because it'd get old sometimes, and other times you really do want all the lights on.
My garage door opener was another. With near 100% accuracy my garage door would open when I was coming down my alley way. It never false opened though, even if I stopped at the grocery store in front of my house. It sometimes failed to open and I actually had to push a button in my car.
Another note, not mentioned here from my skimming, is to never rely on cloud devices. Anything worth doing is worth doing off-line. If your home automation and security can be killed by chopping fiber or coax, then you have neither reliable automation or security. There's infinite options for off-line applications and liquidated DC servers are stupidly cheap to purchase.
Last, if you're going to do home automation, make sure you start by building it on a separate network from your browsing network (preferably air gapped) - especially if you intend on using WiFi devices. They will crowd and slow down your network. Vary your solutions. Put some on LoRa, some on WiFi, some on Ethernet, some on ZWave, etc...
> And since smartphones are ubiquitous, it is not unreasonable that your landlord would choose a technology that requires you to have one. “Almost everybody has a smartphone nowadays,” Mr. Goldberg said. “I don’t think the courts would be sympathetic to that” if you challenged the policy.
A technology that ~85% of people possess[1] can be mandatory to live in a building? Feels discriminatory and it seems like a bad opinion from one lawyer.
Is "discrimination" really the only evil we can think of these days?
The surveillance dystopia we are racing towards is only criticized if the facial recognition cameras spying on our every move work slightly worse on black people.
In this case, a phone is a device that is known to, at minimum, track your location, and now the landlord wants to run their code on it that you have only their word to trust is not nefarious, and can log every entry and exit to your apartment.
What % of the population own such a device is utterly irrelevant to whether its use should be mandatory to obtain shelter.
It's funny because if they tried to replace key locks with fingerprint readers there'd be an immediate lawsuit over accessibility despite far more than 85% of people having usable fingers.
according recent Czech statistical bureau data[1] only 81% Czechs over 16 own smartphone, if you count kids the percentage drops even lower, but why should kids after school be able to get into building and apartment, right?
Butterfly seems to be taking over everywhere. I recently moved to a new building, and they're using it, as well as every individual apartment having fob-based locks on a separate system, without any key backup. We had our first power outage a few weeks ago, and it meant I had no way of locking my door behind me. The person's described problem at least doesn't apply here, though, since the same fob works on the front door.
Additionally, the staircases were fobbed to get back in, which meant immediately after getting into the staircase, I had no way of getting back onto my floor. They pretty quickly propped all the doors open, at least, but still seems pretty awful from a trade-off perspective as a tenant. I'm sure it makes the management of keys in general a billion times easier for the building, though.
If you want to see something truly scary, from the point of view of an ISP, the number of building management people installing access control system who want a static public IP for them and intend to plug them directly into the internet without any form of firewall or router in between. Same with camera systems! And keyfob systems! And "smart" management devices of all types. They have no clue whatsoever.
My building has fob-based locks that are battery powered and work when the power is out, which I know because they recently replaced the batteries. Just another anecdote I wanted to contribute.
I am not a lawyer, but based on my experience with New York tenant law the attorney is correct that the apartment management only needs to provide you with a means to enter and secure the apartment.
If I did not want to use the app, I would instead claim that the TOS of the app itself is an addendum to the lease and refuse to consent to the terms of the app. The building management would then need to figure out a way to get you into the your apartment without agreeing to the app terms.
I am surprised the attorney consulted for the article did not bring up this issue. I also would not expect to receive a lease renewal in this situation.
I am not a lawyer, but based on my experience with New York tenant law the attorney is correct that the apartment management only needs to provide you with a means to enter and secure the apartment.
Meaning - if that "means" is a smartphone - then (unless the lease you signed says otherwise), the landlord is obligated to provide you with a smartphone (along with a fully paid contract).
Otherwise it's a lockout, which under NYC tenant law constitutes over harassment. Period, end of story.
The seems reasonable to me. The landlord is basically requiring you to agree to the Android or iOS terms as well as any terms of the app itself. You can't be forced to agree to these.
I wonder the same thing about work. If my job wants me to use some software can they require me to agree to the ToS? What happens if I don't want to?
I lived in a fancy apartment complex in the east of Moscow for about a year recently. We had physical keys (except for an NFC-card to open the outside doors/gates, which was tolerable), but there was no doorbell of any kind.
The idea was that you'd have a fancy app that would let you "register" guests and the doormen would receive notifications about this with information about the guests (privacy concerns anyone?!).
In practice all of the following happened:
- Nobody used the app. I believe that nobody in that building even knows _how_ to use the app, including staff. My landlord had no idea, the doormen had no idea, etc. What ended up happening is that the concierge desk got a "blessed" landline phone and anyone who knew that phone number was implicitly "authorised" to allow them to let anyone in. Some doormen didn't even bother and just let anyone in who looked like they wanted to enter.
- Unannounced visitors had absolutely no way to make themselves known to you if they didn't have another way to contact you (e.g. technicians showing up). This actually happened to me once with a delivery driver who somehow didn't get my phone number, and got stuck in "doorman limbo" until I realised that something was off and went downstairs to ask the doorman if he'd seen anyone, and found the poor guy hanging out in the lobby.
- On the off chance that somebody would have figured out how to use the app, it's likely it wouldn't have worked because I don't think any of the workflows of anyone there involved looking at whatever/wherever the app was supposed to do its thing.
This is just the most recent example of this kind of crap for me. Sometime earlier I had an experience with a similar building in Oslo, where I ended up being the only person who could get into the building during a power outage because I absolutely insisted on having a physical key for the front door.
I say the same of "menu apps" in restaurants. This crap existed before the pandemic but covid made's it a million times worse. Jesus Christ am I sick of scanning a QR code and straining at my tiny phone screen to choose my order from a crappy, unresponsive website where each page takes ten seconds to load. How is this possibly an improvement over a paper menu?
If I run out of phone battery, lose or misplace my phone, lent it to a friend because they needed it in an emergency, left it at samsung/apple service center for repair, or my screen cracked and wont take touch input, or ran out of data on my plan, or plan got deactivated by Telcom provider error, or got phone got infected by malware, or ran out of storage or memory, my bank/work says the apartment app is malware ...
My apartment complex uses Latch. Honestly I figured there'd be way more problems with it than I've actually dealt with. The worst was when the battery in the deadbolt got within 5% life remaining and so it wouldn't consistently lock or unlock with its motor until the battery was replaced; I could still lock it from within my unit like normal.
As long as maintenance crew keeps an eye on the battery and replaces it proactively, I don't really have any issues.
I think one other time it needed some kind of soft reset but that's been it so far in almost two years of daily use.
A couple things I do wish it could do:
1. It seems to have a camera built in but there's no way to look through it on the app. Would be handy for checking who's at the door from my phone.
2. I can only unlock my door from the app. Occasionally I would like to check if it's already locked and if not, then lock it; for some reason this function isn't available.
Sometimes I do wish I had a physical key but I haven't really _needed_ one so far. There are also multiple ways to unlock the door:
1. Phone app
2. Watch app
3. Passcode
Sure you have to memorize the passcode but that's not really a huge deal, IMO.
Note that Latch offers a physical key, which I got when I asked for it in exchange for a $50 deposit, but as my landlord noted, “please use the app occasionally instead of the keycard, so that we can receive low battery reports”.
Which means, as far as I can determine anyways, that Latch uses the app method so that building owners don’t have to deploy wireless AP infrastructure, and can instead externalize all status reporting about a lock to your phone’s cellular/wifi plan.
(It also offers backup PINs, but their keypads are really awful.)
My biggest problem with Latch is the latency. My building switched from old-school key fobs to Latch, and even ignoring the extra time spent unlocking my phone to access the Latch app, once the phone is in front of the scanner communicating it takes multiple seconds to unlock. To say nothing of whether it seems like that reader is having a bad day, and I have to use a different door with a functioning reader.
The old key fob unlocked the door instantly (no noticeable lag) 100% of the time without fail. And I didn’t have to have a spare hand to “unlock” my fob to use it.
My complex has been on Latch for about a half year and my experiences are consistent with yours; nothing bad to report so far. (Except one day where the intercom system was out of power or something so delivery people could not call me on it to buzz them in.)
As an iOS user I enjoy being able to say (with phone in pocket) as I approach the lobby door "Hey Siri, unlock lobby" and have it be done by the time I am at the door. I wish this functionality was enabled for my apartment door but it's not, so I still have to pull the phone out, go to the widget, and push a button. As you said elsewhere, Latch doesn't seem to use the native iOS functionality for interacting with locks, so that may be the cause; it's also, as you also said, likely the cause of the latency between requesting an unlock and it actually happening.
It feels like we are nicely building a single point failure for everything.
Now we can dream that some day maybe in 10 years someone will push a software update to every Apple device that will automatically brick them and enjoy the ensuring chaos. As people are unable to do anything at all.
A more interesting consideration is how much data is going to be collected, retained, and monetized down the line. And probably handed over to law enforcement.
Do they have a phone charger at the door? I have an almost 3yo iPhone SE, which only just makes it through the day on a charge (if I don't use it lot's).
The moment I get home is the time of the day I'm most likely going to have a flat phone battery. I've often headed out for a run or a ride only to have my phone die just before getting hime, since Strava (gps activity tracking) has burner through my battery.
So no way I'd want a house app for a house lock. Also, what about power failures, network outages? (I live on a island (pop 500k) so there have been already been multiple multi-hour near island wide internet outages - in which not even businesses can accept card payments). I assume the landlord couldn't blame you for smashing a window to gain entry in such a circumstance?
We had this (thankfully an optional addition to physical keys) at one of my previous buildings. The failure rate was maybe 2% but still way too high to trust for regular use.
The locks also ran on batteries, which a technician came out multiple times in the ~year I lived there to replace. Overall was a nice add-on to the physical key for e.g. guest access but the economics of these things given the battery replacement seems dubious. If it ain't broke...
I had two phones break on me this year, due to the internal electronics failing. Not dropped or cracked, just screen gradually losing the ability to display correctly then eventually going dark continuously.
That's when I found out my business bank cannot do payments with their web banking if I don't have a registered, still working phone. And their phone-in banking service with its large voice menu and long waiting times also does not support making a payment. Lots of other things, general help, registering new devices, but not basic banking. For that you must have a registered device, they confirmed.
I had to buy a new phone (twice, in a hurry), and only then could I make a simple payment.
That was annoying. Imagine how much more annoying it would be to be stuck outside your home for a few days waiting for your new phone to be shipped!
(Hope the courier doesn't put it through the letterbox too!)
I can't imagine that this undisclosed requirement wouldn't let the tenant escape their lease, or at a very minimum allow them to force the landlord to provide a phone for that purpose if they don't want to abandon the lease.
You know a lot of these “lockouts” can be avoided by only giving tenants the ability to lock their door via a deadbolt…get rid of the ability to lock their doors via knob lock
My mind immediately goes back a few years, to when high-end Land Rovers were being routinely stolen, because their "smart" keys were trivial to hack.
Regulatory suggestion: Any landlord with "smart" locks and an app is required to maintain an extremely large insurance policy, to cover the "if the app system is hacked" scenario. And any extra premiums which tenants' insurers require, because of issues with not-so-"smart" systems? Landlord pays.
Technological choices are acts of power over others, and technologies
are a way of not having to experience the world. Your landlord's choice
of an "app" is a subconscious attempt to make you (as a concern)
disappear.
The fastest way of getting court attention--as suggested in the article--is most certainly through a reasonable accommodation claim.
I think a key to the apartment is something that's de facto supplied with a lease. They can't require you to spend additional money for a smartphone and service. (They key can be a fob or card in 2022, of course.)
[+] [-] iza|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kodah|3 years ago|reply
That said, I built up an ideology that any automation added should never replace physical items. All automation should have physical kill switches. Any occupants of the home should have appropriate access to things that you would normally give them physical access to.
I implemented walking lights successfully in my old house by replacing switches and doing some neat presence detection (near-field and general) tricks. That mode could be turned off at the front of the house, and frankly I found myself using it because it'd get old sometimes, and other times you really do want all the lights on.
My garage door opener was another. With near 100% accuracy my garage door would open when I was coming down my alley way. It never false opened though, even if I stopped at the grocery store in front of my house. It sometimes failed to open and I actually had to push a button in my car.
Another note, not mentioned here from my skimming, is to never rely on cloud devices. Anything worth doing is worth doing off-line. If your home automation and security can be killed by chopping fiber or coax, then you have neither reliable automation or security. There's infinite options for off-line applications and liquidated DC servers are stupidly cheap to purchase.
Last, if you're going to do home automation, make sure you start by building it on a separate network from your browsing network (preferably air gapped) - especially if you intend on using WiFi devices. They will crowd and slow down your network. Vary your solutions. Put some on LoRa, some on WiFi, some on Ethernet, some on ZWave, etc...
[+] [-] carbocation|3 years ago|reply
A technology that ~85% of people possess[1] can be mandatory to live in a building? Feels discriminatory and it seems like a bad opinion from one lawyer.
1 = https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2021/computer...
[+] [-] pannSun|3 years ago|reply
The surveillance dystopia we are racing towards is only criticized if the facial recognition cameras spying on our every move work slightly worse on black people.
In this case, a phone is a device that is known to, at minimum, track your location, and now the landlord wants to run their code on it that you have only their word to trust is not nefarious, and can log every entry and exit to your apartment.
What % of the population own such a device is utterly irrelevant to whether its use should be mandatory to obtain shelter.
[+] [-] causi|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hackernewds|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Markoff|3 years ago|reply
[1] https://www.czso.cz/documents/10180/200499059/csu_tk_ict_pre...
[+] [-] BlueTemplar|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] helsinkiandrew|3 years ago|reply
Also I'm sure a court would be quite sympathetic if the app fails and you can't access the apartment your paying rent for..
[+] [-] ryukoposting|3 years ago|reply
1. costs me hundreds of dollars to replace if it breaks
2. goes through its whole battery in a day or two
3. is rendered inoperable while wearing heavy winter gloves
4. will inevitably force me to agree to giving away PII for free before granting me its services
I'll stick with the metal key, thanks.
[+] [-] Sebguer|3 years ago|reply
Additionally, the staircases were fobbed to get back in, which meant immediately after getting into the staircase, I had no way of getting back onto my floor. They pretty quickly propped all the doors open, at least, but still seems pretty awful from a trade-off perspective as a tenant. I'm sure it makes the management of keys in general a billion times easier for the building, though.
[+] [-] GenerocUsername|3 years ago|reply
The digital keys do save a huge amount of trivial resets and lock outs that are otherwise dealt with via manual labor.
Seems like it should be mandatory that the doors have either a physical backup (key) or several days of stored power.
[+] [-] walrus01|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chrisbolt|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] irrational|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anigbrowl|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] entrylevel|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danielfoster|3 years ago|reply
If I did not want to use the app, I would instead claim that the TOS of the app itself is an addendum to the lease and refuse to consent to the terms of the app. The building management would then need to figure out a way to get you into the your apartment without agreeing to the app terms.
I am surprised the attorney consulted for the article did not bring up this issue. I also would not expect to receive a lease renewal in this situation.
[+] [-] akhmatova|3 years ago|reply
Meaning - if that "means" is a smartphone - then (unless the lease you signed says otherwise), the landlord is obligated to provide you with a smartphone (along with a fully paid contract).
Otherwise it's a lockout, which under NYC tenant law constitutes over harassment. Period, end of story.
[+] [-] kevincox|3 years ago|reply
I wonder the same thing about work. If my job wants me to use some software can they require me to agree to the ToS? What happens if I don't want to?
[+] [-] tazjin|3 years ago|reply
The idea was that you'd have a fancy app that would let you "register" guests and the doormen would receive notifications about this with information about the guests (privacy concerns anyone?!).
In practice all of the following happened:
- Nobody used the app. I believe that nobody in that building even knows _how_ to use the app, including staff. My landlord had no idea, the doormen had no idea, etc. What ended up happening is that the concierge desk got a "blessed" landline phone and anyone who knew that phone number was implicitly "authorised" to allow them to let anyone in. Some doormen didn't even bother and just let anyone in who looked like they wanted to enter.
- Unannounced visitors had absolutely no way to make themselves known to you if they didn't have another way to contact you (e.g. technicians showing up). This actually happened to me once with a delivery driver who somehow didn't get my phone number, and got stuck in "doorman limbo" until I realised that something was off and went downstairs to ask the doorman if he'd seen anyone, and found the poor guy hanging out in the lobby.
- On the off chance that somebody would have figured out how to use the app, it's likely it wouldn't have worked because I don't think any of the workflows of anyone there involved looking at whatever/wherever the app was supposed to do its thing.
This is just the most recent example of this kind of crap for me. Sometime earlier I had an experience with a similar building in Oslo, where I ended up being the only person who could get into the building during a power outage because I absolutely insisted on having a physical key for the front door.
Internet connected "things" just suck.
[+] [-] chrisbaker98|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] d357r0y3r|3 years ago|reply
Smart locks with no physical key, QR code based menus, etc - none of this should become a norm.
[+] [-] albert_e|3 years ago|reply
I can't enter my home?
[+] [-] hedora|3 years ago|reply
Is it legal for a landlord to require tenants to log in and out of their apartments? Do these apps effectively do that?
[+] [-] spike021|3 years ago|reply
As long as maintenance crew keeps an eye on the battery and replaces it proactively, I don't really have any issues.
I think one other time it needed some kind of soft reset but that's been it so far in almost two years of daily use.
A couple things I do wish it could do:
1. It seems to have a camera built in but there's no way to look through it on the app. Would be handy for checking who's at the door from my phone.
2. I can only unlock my door from the app. Occasionally I would like to check if it's already locked and if not, then lock it; for some reason this function isn't available.
Sometimes I do wish I had a physical key but I haven't really _needed_ one so far. There are also multiple ways to unlock the door:
1. Phone app 2. Watch app 3. Passcode
Sure you have to memorize the passcode but that's not really a huge deal, IMO.
[+] [-] altairprime|3 years ago|reply
Which means, as far as I can determine anyways, that Latch uses the app method so that building owners don’t have to deploy wireless AP infrastructure, and can instead externalize all status reporting about a lock to your phone’s cellular/wifi plan.
(It also offers backup PINs, but their keypads are really awful.)
[+] [-] jez|3 years ago|reply
The old key fob unlocked the door instantly (no noticeable lag) 100% of the time without fail. And I didn’t have to have a spare hand to “unlock” my fob to use it.
[+] [-] TMWNN|3 years ago|reply
As an iOS user I enjoy being able to say (with phone in pocket) as I approach the lobby door "Hey Siri, unlock lobby" and have it be done by the time I am at the door. I wish this functionality was enabled for my apartment door but it's not, so I still have to pull the phone out, go to the widget, and push a button. As you said elsewhere, Latch doesn't seem to use the native iOS functionality for interacting with locks, so that may be the cause; it's also, as you also said, likely the cause of the latency between requesting an unlock and it actually happening.
[+] [-] mcv|3 years ago|reply
So if your battery runs out, you can't get in?
Admittedly, keys can be lost too, but it's still a new way you can get locked out.
[+] [-] Ekaros|3 years ago|reply
Now we can dream that some day maybe in 10 years someone will push a software update to every Apple device that will automatically brick them and enjoy the ensuring chaos. As people are unable to do anything at all.
[+] [-] into_infinity|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jesterson|3 years ago|reply
There is perfectly nothing wrong with traditional locks to be substituted with another crappy app, whose only goal is data farming.
[+] [-] agilob|3 years ago|reply
Why does my keyfob need access to my messages and contacts?
[+] [-] Humphrey|3 years ago|reply
The moment I get home is the time of the day I'm most likely going to have a flat phone battery. I've often headed out for a run or a ride only to have my phone die just before getting hime, since Strava (gps activity tracking) has burner through my battery.
So no way I'd want a house app for a house lock. Also, what about power failures, network outages? (I live on a island (pop 500k) so there have been already been multiple multi-hour near island wide internet outages - in which not even businesses can accept card payments). I assume the landlord couldn't blame you for smashing a window to gain entry in such a circumstance?
[+] [-] tribune|3 years ago|reply
The locks also ran on batteries, which a technician came out multiple times in the ~year I lived there to replace. Overall was a nice add-on to the physical key for e.g. guest access but the economics of these things given the battery replacement seems dubious. If it ain't broke...
[+] [-] jlokier|3 years ago|reply
That's when I found out my business bank cannot do payments with their web banking if I don't have a registered, still working phone. And their phone-in banking service with its large voice menu and long waiting times also does not support making a payment. Lots of other things, general help, registering new devices, but not basic banking. For that you must have a registered device, they confirmed.
I had to buy a new phone (twice, in a hurry), and only then could I make a simple payment.
That was annoying. Imagine how much more annoying it would be to be stuck outside your home for a few days waiting for your new phone to be shipped!
(Hope the courier doesn't put it through the letterbox too!)
[+] [-] nullc|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] slicktux|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bell-cot|3 years ago|reply
Regulatory suggestion: Any landlord with "smart" locks and an app is required to maintain an extremely large insurance policy, to cover the "if the app system is hacked" scenario. And any extra premiums which tenants' insurers require, because of issues with not-so-"smart" systems? Landlord pays.
[+] [-] nonrandomstring|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] entrylevel|3 years ago|reply
I think a key to the apartment is something that's de facto supplied with a lease. They can't require you to spend additional money for a smartphone and service. (They key can be a fob or card in 2022, of course.)