It’s important to recognize that the privacy violation doesn’t end with that one investigation. Plenty of people will say “I don’t mind if you violate my privacy if you’re catching terrorists and pedophiles.”

Once your information is associated with an account or an IP address, anybody monitoring online activity will have that info. The police don’t give back anonymity. Looking for an abortion? Legal marijuana? Your local polling place? A satanic book club? Maybe you have strong feelings about police brutality, or want to organize a union, or think billionaires shouldn’t be able to hoard resources. And that’s just the stuff your local PD might want to know about you. Maybe they share with other agencies, or political action committees, or kommunity organizations to which they may be members.

The police have demonstrated that they cannot be trusted. Protect yourself, and protect the future.

Do you have an address? Or are you moving around? A PO box is good for people who don’t stay in one place very long, but want to receive mail. Whether you can use that at the bank, the dmv, the IRS, or voting depends entirely upon which state you live in.

All the HVAC control systems are anti-opensource. They pretend like their proprietary controls are trade secrets worth billions in research and development, but ultimately they are all just glorified mercury switches. Honeywell, Johnson, Mitsubishi, Schneider, Trane, Siemens, none of them want to allow third party control without getting their beaks wet with licensing fees. Even their commercial departments have started phasing out support for protocols like BACNet and Modbus.

Temperature sensors are cheap as shit. Low voltage relays are cheap as shit. Even digitally controlled zone dampers shouldn’t cost more than $100 installed. If you can access your ventilation in your attic or basement, you could zone every room in your house for less than it costs to replace a single AC compressor, and run it all on a raspberry pi.

But you need to know what you’re doing, and they will throw every hurdle in your way. No contractors would risk drawing the ire of their suppliers by doing it for you.

Her stated motivations are shaky, and that’s if you believe those are her actual motivations.

I like the ambiguity.

Yes, but you’ll have to remove the stock Facebook app from your phone, which may require root access.

Holy shit that’s devious.

Setting up a pihole takes minutes, and will block literally millions of ads on your home network.

The biggest hurdle is teaching yourself not to click on sponsored links. Google will still show promoted results, but you’ll get an error when the pi blocks them from loading. This is annoying for new users, especially if some of the users don’t care that they are being manipulated and just want to see the thing google wants to sell them.

Being friendly doesn’t negate the fact that they are out of compliance with the law. Even sending a second email to insist they delete your data is an undue burden.