Is Your Garage Door Spying on You?

Episode 139: I recently had my garage doors replaced and once the installation was completed the installer left me with some basic instructions on how to use my new LiftMaster Opener - 84504R which is equipped with cameras and WiFi connectivity via a mobile application called MyQ.
The installer described how you can use the mobile app to open and close your garage doors remotely… I asked, “why would anyone ever need to do this?” He described some examples like letting your neighbor into your garage or letting a delivery guy in. OK, so in 20 years of homeownership I never knew I suffered from this problem… This lead me to believe that most others probably haven’t either.
Anyway, apparently the cure to the problem I didn’t know I had is an app called “MyQ” which is owned by Chamberlain Group the same company that owns Liftmaster and which - in turn - is owned by Blackstone, one of the world’s largest private equity companies.
So, for a brief moment I considered joining the approximately 10 million people who use the MyQ app for the privilege of using their own garage doors… Until the registration process required me to agree to let it track me - no opt out option that I could see - and allow it to collect a bunch of my data, track me and serve me ads.
I thought… again, why would any agree to this?
It reminded me of how pharmaceutical companies create a disease in order to sell the cure. The new disease is a “dumb home” and the cure is a smart home run by apps that give you “control” over your home. The dark art here is data collection which happens in the background while you do the things that never required data collection in the past, such as opening your garage doors.
Anyway, if you want to use your Liftmaster the old fashioned way, you can just press the “learn” button on the opener itself and program the keypad with your code, instead of using the MyQ app.
Or if you want a smart home setup, you can use a company called Konnected that has a smart garage door opener that works with your own home server and doesn’t serve you ads or track you. Below this video I’ll link to an article with links to these resources.

[@chrismedeiros3201]

I used the MyQ app until it became necessary to pay for a subscription just to view the camera. In addition to deleting the app, I pushed the camera back into the closed position. If I can't view the camera's image for free, I certainly don't want the possibility of anyone else viewing it for free! Besides, I haven't missed the inability to look at only half of my garage through that camera.

[@RobFreeman]

Haha. My sentiments exactly...!

[@kraxkill4747]

It’s worse than you’d think. I recently installed an infinity 2000 wall mount opener and connected it to their wifi connected app. A month later I found out the thing had moved 1.2GB over my network in less than 30 days. That’s not a ton of data relatively speaking but WAY more than a garage door needs to communicate and this is without cameras or anything like that on it. It’s just a dumb opener. Needless to say I’ve reset its wifi settings and banned its MAC address from my network via my router just in case. Whatever it was doing is more than what it needs to.

[@RobFreeman]

🤯 wow...