Hiome
 

June 28, 2020

Our Commitment To Privacy

We believe privacy is a human right, and it’s central to everything we build. Hiome is designed from the ground up to be private by design.

There is no cloud. It’s just someone else’s computer.

Hiome Core keeps all of your data local within your home. No cloud dependency means your data is safe, your sensors are fast, and everything keeps working even if your internet connection goes down. To accomplish this, we invested significant resources rebuilding a lot of the building blocks of cloud infrastructure inside your home.

To keep placing our money where our mouth is, we’ve also dropped Google Analytics from hiome.com in the interest of your privacy! Just like your data shouldn’t be exfiltrated from your home, we also think it’s wrong to be tracked around the web with cookies. You have a right to privacy everywhere, and we intend to honor that.

Google Analytics is the most popular analytics platform because it’s free. Instead of charging businesses, Google aggregates your data to keep learning more about your browsing habits. Essentially, you’re paying for sites to use Google Analytics with your privacy, and getting nothing in return.

Instead, we’ve switched to Plausible, a much simpler and more privacy-friendly analytics solution with a straightforward business model: they charge us money. As a business, we don’t need to know every little thing about you, but we do need to know if people are visiting us at all so that we can measure our conversion rate. To that end, the only data we look at are total visitors, referrals, and your device type (e.g., mobile, tablet, laptop, or desktop). That’s it. We don’t use any cookies, so you’re not tracked around the web. Instead, it just gives us a general idea of how well we’re doing.

What you do in your home is your business, and it should not be monetized or weaponized. You shouldn’t have to decide whether it’s worth trading privacy for convenience. Those same values apply when you’re browsing our website.

As Ben Franklin said, “Those who would give up essential privacy to purchase a smart home, deserve neither privacy nor a smart home,” or something like that. We won’t let you down, Ben.

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