> No one is willing to give up control.

Agreed. I recently moved into a new house. The builder put in a "clare smart home system." This included a clare home display mounted in the hallway with an inward facing camera. This device is exclusively controlled by security/smart home companies that contract with clare. I have no option to disable the camera, disable the phoning home, etc. In fact, before I can do anything meaningful on the device, they required an in-home appointment where they would set up every smart device in the house for "free," but future additions would require a paid service call for them to come out and set them up.

I had emailed them asking about whether there was an alarm system, and before I got any reply I found an option on the display to activate the alarm. Which I did. But before it actually activated (it gave some sort of countdown), I pressed Cancel. It prompted me for a PIN, which I could only get from the installers. I had no option to cancel the alarm other than to cut power to the device, but once I pulled it off the wall it started wailing a tamper alarm that wouldn't stop until I pulled the backup battery. Oh and I found out later that it was snapping photos of me against my will and without my permission. Please note this all happened before the in-home appointment (which never happened).

I canceled the appointment, permanently tore the thing off the wall, and it's destined for a landfill because the only way to get it to work is to activate it through that alarm company. Oh and they won't even return my calls/emails after I canceled the appointment. I tried calling them to see if they wanted it so they could use it as a warranty replacement or something, instead of putting it in the garbage.

Every "smart" thing they put in this house sucks. The Ring doorbell doesn't function as a doorbell if it loses wifi connection. Oh and when it's connected, the initial press does ring the doorbell, but subsequent presses don't ring the doorbell, and this is by design. During the brief time I had it connected, I was getting constant alerts of suspicious people in my neighborhood, with attached photos of black people walking on a sidewalk. what!? It turns out it didn't recognize my address so connected me to some default place in Texas (I live in Washington!). There was no way to manually select a location, so I guess I was going to get false, racist alerts until such time as Ring decided to recognize my address. I reset it and canceled my Ring account. I'm going to replace it with a normal door bell button. This is getting thrown in the garbage as well.

The "smart" z-wave switches haven't been connected/activated so should function as normal switches right? Nope, they do this stupid dim/undim thing and periodically completely fail to work until I turn off/on the circuit breaker. Another 5 items destined for a landfill to be replaced by regular switches.

The smart front door lock (keypad) and smart garage door openers have never been connected to anything and I'm going to leave them that way. I really wish there was a hardware kill switch that would disable all wireless connections and leave them in a dumb mode. I'm worried someone else can come in and connect their phone or something, since I've never set them up.

(in case anyone wants a free clare home panel, PM me an address to mail it to and I'll send it; rather have someone tinker with or hack it than trash it)