Everything. Like e.g. my robot vacuum that I couldn't operate between 1600 yesterday and noon today, because the Internet was down and the robot insists on being able to talk with servers in China to be able to vacuum the floor. Same with my A/C and floor thermostats, except those at least have IR remotes or wall panels for local control.
Of course, I am operating all those via an Open Source HomeAssistant app, connecting to an Open Source HomeAssistant instance running on an Open(ish) Hardware Raspberry Pi. But all of that means fuck all, when the malicious vendors make a cloud server a required control intermediary. Despite all that Open Source, my home appliances are still run as a Service. That's one of many cases of what I mean by "being implicitly a SaaS".
Worst thing is, you have little choice. In my case:
- There's approximately zero non-SaaS robot vacuums among the newer models. I gave up on this after a long search for something free of this insanity.
- With my A/C unit and thermostats, the brand and model choice was made by the people doing the installations. I'm not sure if there are non-cloud, network-controllable options anymore, and even if they were, I'd have to look for local HVAC companies that actually offer them.
- I spent much more time and money than is reasonable to have a fully-local networked baby cam, that doesn't leak videos to the cloud. Specifically, I had to buy a camera and two pieces of expensive network gear from Ubiquity (per HN advice, thank you), because that's apparently the only option in Europe (US folks have Amcrest), other than hacking something together from a spare Android phone, or webcams and Raspberry Pi. There's literally no other cloud-bullshit-free option I could find.
(The "baby cam" is at least made of professional, high-quality gear, so that's a silver lining, but I doubt normal people would be happy to spend €500+ just to keep the video stream in-house.)
Of course, I am operating all those via an Open Source HomeAssistant app, connecting to an Open Source HomeAssistant instance running on an Open(ish) Hardware Raspberry Pi. But all of that means fuck all, when the malicious vendors make a cloud server a required control intermediary. Despite all that Open Source, my home appliances are still run as a Service. That's one of many cases of what I mean by "being implicitly a SaaS".