I’ve backed the Kickstarter project Point. Point is a device that on the front-end, in your home, works as a sensor hub and alarm. At the back-end it feeds a machine learning database that learns your patterns, and shows them to you over time. The whole set-up can be controlled by an app (both iPhone and Android). An API is provided, and it can also talk to IFTTT so you can connect your own triggers and devices if you want (and I do).

Point is an existing product, and this Kickstarter is meant to collect pre-orders for the second generation device.

To me the alarm part of the Point devices is less interesting than having a very capable sensorhub in the home. I’ve pre-ordered 4 Points, one for each floor of our home, and one for the garden shed. The sensors it has on board are:

• Sound
• Temperature
• Humidity
• Tamper
• Barometric pressure
• Ambient light
• Motion/PIR

The company behind Point is Minut based in Sweden and China, and they state they take privacy protection seriously. It delivers on this, the company says, by doing a lot of the sensor signal processing locally in the device, and then only forwarding exceptions or events of interest (sudden sound e.g. in dB, though not the sound itself) to the centralised database at Minut. Traffic is encrypted, though the owner of the device has no posession of the keys. So in the event that the company should close up shop, there is the risk of having 4 smart but bricked devices, because there would be no way to read out the data it is sending, nor redirect the data to another database for instance. Given they’ve been around since 2014, this is their second run (and they know all about production and supply chains already) and that Thomas is now an investor and advisor to them, is reassuring. Hopefully over time they realise that true privacy also means I should have full control over how and where the traffic gets send, even if it means foregoing their entire back-end service. By the time the devices get delivered (May, so likely just in time for the Stuff That Matters 2018 Smart Homes unconference), I intend to open a discussion with them on those ‘privacy by design‘ aspects.