I was very excited to read that the companion app now supports multiple instances of HA. First off - in the description that follows - everyone I know uses an Android phone (not sure if this matters - but I’ll mention it up front). I use HA in my home, my son & his wife use HA in their home, and my daughter and son-in-law will soon be using it in their home. When anyone is out of town, we “look after” each others homes (something HA is great for assisting with).
The ability to have multiple instances of HA in the app sounds great for helping us here. I haven’t tried this new feature yet but plan to within the next week or so.
I have a concern though, and am looking for other users thoughts and ideas. Perhaps people using this new feature in the app have already figured this out.
I’d like for my son and daughter to be able to access my home via the HA phone app. As part of my implementation, I detect their presence in the house and use that to turn climate systems on and control lights differently etc. I use a zone called “near home” to try and get heat or AC running before they physically arrive at “home”
Currently (they don’t have the HA app running for my house), I detect their presence in my house by their cell phones connecting to my router. I adjust climate systems and lighting schedules accordingly. Because they don’t have the app, there is no geo-locating and I can’t tell where they are, so things like “near home” aren’t available. This all works fine and I’d be prepared to leave it like that (ie - cell to router connection being my only indication that they are physically in my house).
If they are running the HA app though, I would know a lot more. For example, if you click on the person entity for a person that uses the app, you get a google map and you can see where that person is.
This part I wouldn’t want (it seems wrong on so many levels that I would be able to track the locations of my adult children when they are not in my house.) I wouldn’t do this anyway - but it would be better if I just couldn’t - and vice-versa my children tracking my wife and I.
So, I would like to get the benefits of knowing when they are in my house and have them have the benefits of having the app so they control things in my house, but I don’t want to know where they are when they aren’t here.
The first option I thought of would be to toggle the app setting for location off - so the app wouldn’t know where the cell phone was. They wouldn’t get the benefits of geo-locating (eg near-home identification) - but as I mentioned above, that would be OK. However, if you turn off the location sensor - would that turn it off for their own homes HA instances as well? That is, would this be a universal setting that affects all instances of HA that the phone controls - or would it be specific to each instance?
I wonder what any other implications are of one having the app without location privileges turned on.
Also, before I move ahead with this, are there other privacy related concerns others have thought about?