Privacy

A lot of IoT products have been introduced in recent years. Sadly, the trend in these products is to send all data to the cloud and manage your house from there. We’ve come to realize that it’s not in the big corporations interest to make a product that focuses on privacy and local control. Our data is too useful for them.

We don’t like this trend. We don’t like seeing more and more of our data being hoarded by a few giant companies, centralizing it in a few systems and using it to influence how we’ll be treated online. It’s our lives, our data, and we should be in control. Not some algorithm optimized for engagement.

With Home Assistant Cloud we're breaking this trend.

We provide a home automation solution that is built from the ground up with privacy in mind.

We start by building on top of Home Assistant. A project that we designed to be all about privacy and local control. All parts of it are open source which allows people to exactly see what data is available in their house.

The connection from Home Assistant to the cloud is also fully open source so that you can exactly see what is being sent out. The code to handle the incoming messages is also open source: Google Assistant, Amazon Alexa.

Our remote UI feature is also open source and inner workings are documented, to ensure we're providing the best possible security.

Voice services

Our voice services (Text-to-speech (TTS) / Speech-to-text (STT)) rely on Microsoft Azure Cognitive services. Nabu Casa handles Microsoft Cognitive credentials negotiation. Interactions between your Home Assistant instance and Microsoft Cognitive services are open source. Nabu Casa does not proxy your requests. Nabu Casa does not have access to your generated audio, input audio, input and output text. Privacy for voice services ultimately depends on Microsoft Azure's privacy policies.

For real-time speech to text, audio input is processed only on the Azure's server memory, and no data is stored at rest. All data in-transit are encrypted for protection.

Microsoft states as follows for TTS:

Microsoft does not retain or store the text that you provide with the real-time synthesis text to speech API. [...] Microsoft does not store audio or video content generated with the real-time synthesis API.