Today it is no longer possible to surprise anyone with a smart home. If earlier the possession of gadgets from the category of smart home was considered an extreme degree of geekiness, now every second person has a smart lamp or, at worst, an outlet. Not to say that these are things from the must-have category, but sometimes it is convenient to activate a kettle, a coffee maker by voice, or just turn on or off the light when you are too lazy to reach for the switch. However, many people prefer not to be limited only to smart lighting, but also equip the whole house with smart appliances, which is why they sometimes suffer.
Why Google has disabled smart home from Xiaomi
Google has disconnected smart home devices Xiaomi from the Google Home platform. This is a completely unprecedented case, caused by inappropriate behavior of the smart security camera Xiaomi Mi jia. As it turned out, several users complained that every time they ask an assistant to display video from their own cameras on the smartphone screen, they actually see recordings from strangers. It turns out, undesirable viewers concluded that if they see footage from other people's houses, then someone sees what their own cameras are filming.
Why smart home Xiaomi won't connect
Smart camera Xiaomi allows you to spy on other people
It is rather strange that the images from other people's cameras that were seen by random users were not color and suffered from all sorts of distortions. Because of this, the effect of observing on a webcam was created, as is often the case in horror films. What exactly this is connected with is difficult to say. But, most likely, we will not know about this anymore, because Google, in order to protect its users from unauthorized surveillance by third parties, simply took and blocked the ability to control Mi Home-related equipment through Google Home.
According to Google officials, the shutdown is temporary and the ability to interact with smart gadgets Xiaomi will be restored as soon as the cause of the failure is found, and it will be fixed. True, how much time it can take, Google did not specify, leaving itself room for maneuver. In the end, the main responsibility for the search falls not on her, but on Xiaomi, which, in fact, made the failure, which means that it is she who must find it, and then fix it.
Why smart home is dangerous
In general, what happened is a completely non-trivial case. Not only has nothing like this ever happened before, but Xiaomi actually put its users in serious danger by allowing strangers to spy on them in real time. Now we need to find out if it was possible to determine the address from which the video came. After all, if a failure occurred in the network, which accidentally mixed the belonging of the cameras, it is possible that in this way it was possible to track the actual location of the shooting.
Until the collaboration of devices Xiaomi and the Google Home platform is restored, users will have other options for managing them. This can be done, for example, through the Mi Home application or, say, using Alice's voice assistant from Yandex. To do this, you need to add all gadgets that are no longer compatible with Google Home into new applications and interact with them either manually or by voice if using Alice. In addition, it is possible to connect Siri, with which such problems, as described above, do not occur.