Ecobee SmartThermostat

Hey look, a smart home tech maker that seems to really, truly value their users’ privacy. It’s so nice to see. The first point in their privacy policy is what we wish all companies would say and do: “Your Personal Information and the data created by your ecobee Devices belong to you. You have the right to have a copy your (sic) Personal Information and Device Data at any time, and to be forgotten if you so choose.” Good work ecobee!

These smart thermostats know which room you're in and if you ask Alexa a bunch of questions. There's nothing terrible about either of those things, just be aware that your thermostat could potentially know a lot about you. Any voice requests you make of Alexa through your smart thermostat (what a weird statement) will let Amazon know more about you, of course. But hey, Amazon probably knows way too much about you already.

Ecobee reportedly also stood up to Amazon when they demanded they 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 many fronts. Ecobee asks users to donate their data with an opt-in option to help scientists help save the planet. Again, good work ecobee!