I’m not sure what everybody is worried about.
HA doesn’t have any ears jet, so even if the feature is activated it doesn’t do much in relation to privacy.
And unless you actively add some it won’t grow ears either.
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It’s a new feature and the creator wants their average user base to enjoy it. I think that’s perfectly reasonable and no need for a deep explanation. The developers already offer a way for advanced users like yourself to disable features. The default config feature is designed for average users to enjoy new features without changing anything. If you don’t fit into that category you should then take control of your configuration.
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You’re missing the main point which is whether it should be disabled by default. My vote is for disabled.
I am a long time HA user and to be honest I didn’t even know the default config existed until they added the energy feature and I wondered why I couldn’t see it! My point is that having the required keys in your configuration.yaml isn’t that onerous and indeed allows you to unload any of the integrations you don’t actually use. You can keep an eye on what is included (beside watching the release notes) by visiting this page Default Config - Home Assistant
Hello, I’m sorry it’s taken me so long to respond, I’m in a country that is having significant problems with its power grid.
On review, framing this issue in terms of the benefits and risks of language recognition technology is the wrong way to approach this; as far as that goes, I think it’s sufficient to acknowledge that the tech is cool, but that privacy issues do exist.
A simplified form of the issue is, if saying no requires giving up the functional benefits of automatic configuration, then it’s not a choice. This should not be on by default, any more than any “user choice” feature should be.
The following statement is true, and should also make it clear how unnecessary this thread is.
`“Assist is an optional, non-critical feature that make Home Assistant even easier to use. You can choose not to use it, but in that case you must be computer literate and willing to perform manual edits every time a new version breaks something.”
Is it necessary to argue further? I hope it’s not, because this is an issue that doesn’t need to exist.
Anyone claiming that manual config is easy has not been using Home Assistant long enough to remember what it was like when the default config didn’t exist. The YouTube channels of people like The Hookup, Dr ZZz, and Bruh exist because while using a text editor is easy, editing YAML isn’t.
Home Assistant is only accessible to people that aren’t computer literate because default config now exists. Requiring end users to become computer literate in response to an arbitrary decision to enable a thing, isn’t a good choice, and doesn’t respect how far the platform has come.
I admire @frenck a great deal, and would value a statement from him on this issue. I would also like to reiterate that this isn’t about the value of Assist, or, I’d prefer it not to be. It’s about turning on features by default without making it possible to disable them easily in the Settings menu.
If it isn’t easy for end users to turn it off, you haven’t given them a choice at all.
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Having searched around this forum a bit, it’s pretty clear this is never going to happen even if every single HA user asked for it.
@tom_l is on a rampage to close all feature requests related to customisation of default config and merges them all into this feature request (which he has also archived to pretend it’s not something people want):
Closed all these…
If you are going to passively aggressively abuse the mods at least get your facts right.
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That is a WTH topic not a feature request. The whole WTH category was archived once the month was over, not just that topic - and it was not archived by me.
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The reason for closing duplicate feature requests (or WTH posts) and directing people to the first request is to consolidate the votes in one topic rather than having one or two votes split all over the place. I’m actually helping you make the request popular.
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Don’t passively aggressively abuse the mods. If you have a legitimate complaint against any of the forum staff please contact the forum admins or one of the other mods instead.
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I’m very new to Home Assistant. Installed it yesterday for the first time. Finally made my way to this post wanting this exact feature. Since the developers are not interested in fulfilling this request, I just patched my local instance like this:
I don’t spend a ton of time in python and certainly don’t grok the entire codebase of HA but throwing a tiny breaker in that respects the config and doesn’t load integrations seems to be working for me locally. Since I won’t change the code base all too often and the patch is pretty tiny, this should work for me good enough.
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Hi @Multiply9378, sorry it’s taken me so long to respond.
Your solution is incredibly elegant, and I thank you for coming up with it. I wish I had any kind of competency to implement it myself, because quite frankly it is bizarre that this isn’t a thing yet.
I am genuinely beginning to question why this situation exists. I do not believe it is by malicious design, but based on what it looks like from the outside, it really does feel like there’s a vested interest in this not being easy for the average user to do.
I still have not heard an argument for why the status quo exists, when it is so objectively broken.
Anyway, thank you again. I hope your simple solution is merged.
If it is, in fact, easy for a person like me to implement, would you mind posting a tutorial?
In short I believe the thinking is this: You can’t have respect for the user’s choice to define their own system if things keep being added automatically.
Default config loads a set of commonly used integrations for users that are new to home assistant or simply don’t want to bother configuring this sort of thing. It is also a way for the devs to automatically load new integrations into users configurations when they become available with new releases.
If you want control over this you remove default config, add the integrations you do want, and keep an eye on release notes for any new integrations you may like to add.
That second part is not onerous. It took me less than a minute to do originally and every month 5 minutes of reading release notes.
Excluding instead of including is simply a different way of doing this. However it has the disadvantage of no longer respecting the user’s choice to have control over their loaded integrations. As new integrations will be added automatically with new releases, requiring the user to explicitly exclude them.
i.e. opt-in has become opt-out if using excludes.
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opt-out vs opt-in seems a different discussion than the main point of this topic: make it eay to opt out.
Why not a feature toggle? I like the idea of Android phones, where I can simple choose to switch off the newly added features/apps that send and sell my life to Samsung.
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Hi @tom_l,
As always, I appreciate your willingness to engage. Thank you for your response.
I’ll quickly summarise what I want to say, and then give you a longer version if you have time.
Short version: It is possible to configure most everything via the GUI, with the notable exception of consent. Until issues of consent can be addressed via the GUI, every statement made about Home Assistant respecting user choice is objectively false.
Long version:
You wrote a thing that wasn’t true. You were reporting it, not claiming it was true yourself, but it wasn’t true. You said:
In short I believe the thinking is this: You can’t have respect for the user’s choice to define their own system if things keep being added automatically.
But things are added automatically all the time, with almost every release. Since that base statement is demonstrably not true (again, you’re reporting a statement, you didn’t say that this was your thinking), I’m afraid that nothing built on it can be true either.
This puts me in an exceedingly difficult position, because of how passionately I disagree with you - not generally, but specifically your last past. I’m going to try not to use emotive language; please excuse me if I slip, because this is very important to me.
I am a farmer in the third world, and I am old. I know what I know about technology out of desperation and necessity, not aptitude. I am in no way “good with computers”. I am a person with limited resources, a strong survival instinct, and access to YouTube.
Home Assistant was the gateway for me. Through Home Assistant, I discovered ESPHome, and realised that I could make things - real, complex things, that could work on the farm - without having to learn to write code, which had always been the barrier for me. The system enabled me to do things I couldn’t have done if I had had to be much more computer literate than I am.
I used HA to survive the last seven years of drought (mercifully ended in 2022) because, without getting into a truck and driving everywhere, I was able to monitor precisely how long it took for each borehole to run dry, and how long to refill, because it was up on a Lovelace dashboard.
That interface let me find the sweet spot for each pump, and my friend, I finessed that line. Home Assistant’s dashboard found me 12,000 litres a day I didn’t have access to before, and that matters when you need 200,000 day, and only have 40,000.
You don’t understand; how could you? When a person has such little water that they have to choose which parts of their land they will allow to die, what kind of impact do you think a technology like this has; one that so drastically lowers the barrier to entry?
That’s what HA is to me. It opened a door to a world I had only seen on TV. My house is like Star Trek now. I use HA and TTS to wake me with a voice warning in the night if an air bubble is forming in the pipe (can cause pump to burn), or if the chicken incubators are at risk because batteries are running low and I need to unplug stuff. Eventually I’ll own enough relays for it to all happen completely automatically.
In the beginning, it was hard, because default config didn’t exist, and things kept breaking every update, and then I’d have to deal with my wife telling me this was stupid, and I’d have to go watch Dr Zzs to find out how to fix it this time.
And then default config happened. Suddenly, it was all livable. She even gets confused sometimes when she goes into the guest bedroom and the lights don’t go on automatically (no tech in there).
It’s become a magic trick. I don’t even know what happens in the config anymore, not that I was particularly savvy in the yaml to begin with.
I’m telling you this because you persist in stating that it’s not onerous to expect people like me to manage a config file manually. I want you to understand that you are being tone-deaf to the fact that a big chunk of the user base cannot do the thing you think is trivial, because we didn’t grow up with this stuff. I learn, but it is HARD. Home Assistant is accessible to me because so much work has been done to make it easy.
I think what is most upsetting here is that all of us are aware that if Assist had not been turned on by default, we wouldn’t be having this conversation at all.
Instead, we’re having to look at a completely separate issue that is essentially a strawman, because the relevant discussion should be about the ethics of forcing language recognition systems onto people that don’t want them, not giving them an easy opt-out, and then behaving as if their failure to opt out represents consent.
It doesn’t mean we consent. It means we’re the people the system is built for - the ones that need the GUI. While it remains possible to configure everything except consent via the GUI, user consent is being evaded, not respected.
As a result, here we are having arguments about default config. It belittles all of us.
If I don’t accept Assist, I am being told that I’ll need to go back to what HA was before it became usable by the general public. I will need to learn to manually configure 40ish modules that I don’t understand, and update those every few weeks. I am being told that, as if it is a sane thing to say.
That is not respecting my choice. That is punishing me for disagreeing with an invasive technology that is highly topical in the world at present, and it is disingenuous to imply otherwise, because to ignore it requires cognitive dissonance.
Even if I had the aptitude, I do not have the time; I am carrying more families than my own.
I wish you well. I hope we continue talking. I hope the platform demonstrates its stated commitment to user choice by making these choices as easy as claimed. How unnecessary all of this would be then!
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Hi @pwdonline
Why not a feature toggle?
That is a very, very relevant question. I would love to read an argument either on why such a GUI page would be impossible to implement, or would be too disrespectful of user choice.
The fact such a page still doesn’t exist is what makes the claim that opting out is easy so hard to swallow.
Not really, that was meant to indicate it was my opinion. That is what I think the reasoning is.
Sure, new integrations are added with every release, but they are only added to the core, they are not added to your configuration, unless included in default config or you choose to add them. That’s where the choice lies.
they are not added to your configuration, unless included in default config or you choose to add them.
Except, we all use Default Config, so there is no “your config” until something like Assist necessitates one. You are correct from a semantic perspective only, and have not engaged with the points I raised.
You are, of course, under no obligation to do so, but it would be disappointing, because it would rather support the position others have stated, here and elsewhere, that this is not a conversation you want to have.
I’m not certain what the exact reason for the request is. Is having it running even though you don’t use it negatively impacting the performance of your system or is it a desire to have the old user interface look?
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No ‘we’ don’t.
I’ve pretty much explained all I understand about the reasoning for this (in my non developer opinion). I don’t have anything else to add.
No, sir. You have corrected my amateur use of your specialist jargon, for which correction I do thank you, but you have in no way addressed the substance of what I wrote.
I respectfully ask that you try again, particularly as you have marked this thread Solved without doing so. As a reminder, you said the following:
Taking control instead of using default_config really isn’t that hard. It amounts to writing (up to) 39 words in your configuration.yaml file and in future checking the release notes for new integrations you may want to add.
To claim that this statement is true is to argue that Default Config was unnecassary to begin with, because managing config, in your own words, “really isn’t that hard”. The mere existence of Default Config disproves your statement.
I await your further response.
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I have already addressed that.
Apologies for my slow reply; it is peak picking season here, and I am more often on the land than at home. Avocado theft is very high, you see, and small farmers like me have to patrol at night too, or we lose too much of the harvest.
I regret that you have not addressed the issue, at all. You have instead used gatekeeping to attempt to define your way around it.
Those who don’t want to bother? I object, not just because of the rudeness of the implication, but because of the manner in which you continue to dismiss people of my competency level rather than engaging honestly.
I am not a new user; you have known me for years.
I am not a user that “doesn’t want to bother” learning how to manually configure and update 39 modules; I am literally not competent to do so.
I am a normal, everyday user, who relies on Default Config precisely because of how disastrous manual configuration is.
I request confirmation that you are stating the official Home Assistant position, because it doesn’t take a new user to see that this has become an ethics consideration.
I await your further response.
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