Smart locks have become very practical, but there’s one missing feature that could be very useful, and that’s a global access control, especially for post office, firefighters, electricians, gas, lift operators, cleaning companies, etc to enable them to access communal parts of buildings or homes (only my mailbox in my case).
In France a proprietary system already exists called Vigik (not Home Assistant compatible) wich works with NFC tags, almost all buildings with condos are equipped with them and it replaces key keepers / master keys, which are not secure at all.
Only the post office, the fire department and a few very limited official services have access rights, the tokens only last 84 hours. You then have to recharge the NFC tag at a physical terminal on the post office premises or at the fire station to gain access again. These charging terminals are highly controlled, but there may be less complicated alternatives to imagine. Residents however have a permanent key, obviously.
With this system, we could open our smart locks at the postal services, UPS, DHL and more to receive our shipments in an apartment building without having to transmit a pin code to the deliveryman each time, for example.
What do you think? Are there any similar projects already underway?
I realize that this isn’t a feature that depends solely on Home Assistant and that doesn’t yet exist in US and many other countries, but you have to start somewhere.
I guess in France it is only the official/national postal service that have access as a courier service and not also DPD, DHL, GLS, UPS and so on.
The official/national postal service have employed every courier directly and can therefore screen them.
Other courier services might be using a mix of own employed couriers, subcontractors and even subcontractors of subcontractors. Every single level of these can exchange their employees at will, so screening will be impossible to manage, especially when these services are in a competetive market where even marginal cost increases means a loss of orders.
Be it a physical key or other master key system, if one exists then someone will find a way to acquire one for nefarious purposes. I totally understand why someone would want that but I would disable such a feature the moment I realized it existed, I’ll let them break my door down if needed
@WallyR@CO_4X4
Thank you for your feedback. In France with the Vigik system, subcontractors, DHL, UPS etc. also have access for the sake of competition and fairness. Obviously there can be abuses and employees who have already given rights to thugs but the fact that access is limited in time, limits quite a lot of abuses. With this kind of system, there will always be loopholes, but it’s still much better than the old master key system. (The master keys are on sale over the counter on amazon…)
Of course, you shouldn’t put this kind of access on the front door, but only on common areas or mailboxes.
There are already commercial offers on connected mailboxes that work with Vigik, which is extremely practical but only available in France for now.
Here in Denmark there are places that have mailboxes behind a locked door and the national postal service have then access.
This does not work for parcel services though, but it seems every little shop or kiosk here is also a parcel drop of point, so many Danes only have a few hundred meters or less to the pickup point.
