What is a "data privacy thing"?
1 Like
if they sell your data or not
how much privacy you have and if they are surveying you
Not sure what you're asking, exactly... (by the way, I do not work for Hubitat... 
)
Hubitat's policy, though, is that they do not collect any user data, nor do its employees have access to your user data. Their cloud server is simply a safe, secure, cloud endpoint to allow integrations with cloud services, like Google, Amazon, Ecobee, etc... They do not store any of the data that passes through this encrypted endpoint.
1 Like
Among other things, this keeps their costs down.
1 Like
Tagging @bravenel who works for Hubitat and can directly/officially answer your questions regarding data privacy.
You can read their Privacy Policy here, when purchasing a hub from their web store...
thank you very much, that was exacly what i was looking for 
BUT!!! That is just for shopping on their website.
1 Like
I'm sure someone from the HE team will reply because they do take privacy seriously, but their website privacy policy is Here and the Terms of Service are Here
There is an internal astronomical clock to determine sunrise and sunset time. Of course, the time-of-day clock must be accurate for these to be done correctly. But in and of themselves, they do not access the internet.
3 Likes
Cool thanks for clarifying! That's cool to know. I always assumed if my internet was down my sunrise/sunset wouldn't work!
I ran a hub at my parents house for 6 months without internet access, I set it up at my house and updated it then brought it there. At first I had problems with the hubs time each night after the maintenance ran or anytime the hub was rebooted however I wrote a dos script to force the time update via a windows ATJob, then with the time fixed everything worked as expected without internet access. When the 1.5 firmware released and the NPT client app was written I brought the hub back to my house to update it and switched to that app, shortly after my parents decided to get internet.
Read the Terms of Service as well
It's in the Terms of Service - see the bottom of the web page.
It doesn't. You can plug it in, get the IP address from your router and start using it. The cloud facilitates finding your hub's IP address, the app, geo location and other cloud integrations.
I'm just looking to get into Hubitat myself, thanks for this fairly detailed list.
Sucks firmware updates are stuck on requiring an Internet Connection without local upload option. Likewise no settable NTP server to hit a local NTP server.
The rest 100% makes sense, and fundamentally wouldn't work without an Internet connection. Although I do wonder if I could configure a Inbound connection tracking rule to allow outbound traffic only for that individual connection that could then work for remote dashboard/etc (assuming that functionality doesn't require the Hubitat Cloud platform access).
You can't do a local NTP server, but there is an API that lets you set the date/time manually. I'm not sure why they haven't just added a setting to let us set the NTP server (seems to align with their 'local' mission but I digress). Anyway, you could have a raspberry pi or some other device that "pushes" the NTP value to the HE every X minutes or something. That'd get around the need to have internet for NTP, although I agree, it's a bit more work than just setting a my.ntp.local...
But yeah, firmware updates require internet access. They do not provide a firmware file you can download (again, not sure why... security through obscurity I assume of them not wanting you to easily get a firmware file to try to deconstruct it? But just a guess).
I haven't tried so I can't say for sure, but I would think so. It uses cloud.hubitat.com. I'm personally not too worried about it having internet access (I figure everyone else on earth is tracking me much more than HE anyway!) so I haven't experimented with locking it down.
1 Like
There’s a workaround to the hardcoded NTP server issue. It can be done with ASUS routers running Merlin firmware, I’m not sure how many other routers make this possible though.
3 Likes
Good point. Until such time as it is added, there is this NTP client driver from @dan.t, which permits a user-specified NTPd to be used.
3 Likes
