#New to HA and I am tempted to purchase
potent hemlock
wondering how different HA is from other cloud based smart home services?
Well, HA isn't cloud based, the cloud service simply gives you easy remote access and setup for Google Home and Alexa. The smart home part is entirely local to your home.
communication between your HA local instance and cloud is encrypted which can only be decrypted by the local HA instance
Yes, but also for the remote access the encryption is between the remote device and your HA - the clod service is just passing the encrypted packets through. See here for the details of that link.
shell sphinx
Thank you for clarifying. That makes sense. I am also trying to understand when I enable remote UI feature from your HA (I subscribed to the cloud btw) the docs say that a Cert is generated by HA. Is this cert being generated by the local HA and the public key is then sent over to the Cloud where future communication between the cloud and HA local are encrypted by the cert and decryption happens locally?
I think you answered my above question already! Thanks much
I do have one more question about what you said for Google Home and Alexa. when I use Google home to control my HA devices would Google learn about the devices and its patterns?
potent hemlock
Thank you for clarifying. That makes sense. I am also trying to understand when ...
Yes, you've got an encrypted session for Google/Alexa, and a separate one for remote UI access - the remote UI is encrypted between your HA and the remote devices
shell sphinx
Oh encrypted session for Google/Alexa? That’s interesting! When I setup google home then I don’t have to worry about google looking at my data?
potent hemlock
Well, Google will, because they have to
However for GHome it's encrypted between Google and Nabu Casa, and then you and Nabu Casa
(is my understanding)
If you want a private voice assistant see the stuff about the year of voice and the #voice-assistants-archived channel