Ecobee Smart Thermostat Premium

Hey look, a smart home tech maker that seems to value their users’ privacy. It’s nice to see. The first point in Ecobee’s privacy policy is what we wish all companies would say and do: “Your personal information and data belongs to you.” Good work Ecobee! They also say, “If we collect it, we safeguard it.” Another good work Ecobee! The thing is, many companies crow about how much they care and protect their users’ privacy. Too many times this crowing is empty words written by PR departments. For Ecobee though, we really do think they are pretty good at protecting and respecting their users’ privacy (especially compared to many of the Big Tech companies out there).

Ecobee does collect personal information on you. Things like name, address, email, telephone number, online identifiers such as IP addresses and device IDs, location information, as well as things the smart thermostat learns about your home like thermal and olfactory information. That’s potentially a lot of information gathered. The good news is, Ecobee says they never sell your personal data. And they don’t seem to share your personal information with third parties for targeted, interest based advertising, which is also good. So, all that data this smart thermostat collects on you probably isn’t going to be shared around the internet to target you with tons of ads to buy sweaters because you keep your house so cold all winter long (we hope).

The biggest privacy concern you’ll likely find with this smart thermostat is with the third party voice assistants you can use it with. The voice requests you make of Amazon’s Alexa, Google Assistant, or Apple’s Siri through your smart thermostat will let Amazon, Google, or Apple know more about you. But hey, Amazon, Google, and Apple probably know way too much about you already.

Ecobee reportedly also stood up to Amazon when they demanded Ecobee share more user data with them. From The Verge, “...the online retail giant asked Ecobee to share data from its Alexa-enabled smart thermostats, even when the customer wasn’t actively using the voice assistant. Ecobee reportedly refused to have its devices constantly report back to Amazon about the state of the user’s home, including data on which doors were locked or unlocked and the set temperature. The reasoning being that enabling its devices to report this data to Amazon would be a violation of its customer’s trust.” Good Ecobee. Bad Amazon.

Ecobee does ask users if they would like to donate their anonymized data from their smart thermostat to share with energy scientists to help “design more efficient and sustainable homes.” That seems good on a couple fronts. First, Ecobee asks users to donate their data with an opt-in rather than opt-out option. Second, the goal of this data sharing is a good one, not to target you with ads, but to help scientists save the planet. Again, good work Ecobee!

What’s the worst that could happen with your Ecobee Smart Thermostat Premium? Well, this thermostat does come with a smart speaker/microphone built-in and listening for those Amazon Alexa or Google Assistant voice requests. And it can play music on Spotify or make calls. It would be weird to make a phone call through your smart thermostat (it feels like this sentence should end here…but I’ll keep going) and have a hacker hack your smart thermostat and listen in to your phone calls. Or adjust your thermostat up really high and raise your energy bill hundreds of dollars. Or monitor those radar sensors to know when you are home and what room you’re in. All this probably isn’t likely to happen. Still, good to remember it could. All in all though, Ecobee is one of the best smart thermostat makers out there from a privacy perspective.