Oh yes. I talk greatly about that on my blog, crankylinuxuser.net<p>All in all, there are open standards in which IoT devices could communicate: MQTT(mosquitto), CoAP(Californium), AMQP(rabbitMQ) to name a few. Yet, none of the major vendors will touch these technology stacks, precisely because of lock-in to their special-snowflake database servers.<p>There are solutions, of which only 1 is palatable.<p>1. Don&#x27;t buy. (Dumb house, but at least you control it.)<p>2. Only buy company offerings that support the above standards. (Good luck.)<p>3. Build it yourself.<p>I&#x27;m going down the path of &quot;Do it yourself.&quot; I already have a gateway controller acquiring data from sensors and sending data to things like wirelessly connected Neopixels (ws2811 strands). The radio I&#x27;m using is a mesh network chip called nRF24L01+ and the Arduino library is MySensors. Things just work, and work well. I have data dumping into a MQTT Mosquitto instance and processing logic resides in Node-Red.<p>The other part of the Corporate &quot;We hold your data&quot; policy is the main reason they give: so you can control your devices from anywhere. Sounds great. Our solutions are to use things like No-IP.org , but you end up with a max 4 device limit. Not to mention, they also have a draconian ToS. So what else can you use? TOR. ..?<p>What? The essence is that you install TOR on your machine, and edit the &#x2F;etc&#x2F;tor&#x2F;torrc and turn on a hidden service to SSH and HTTPS. Reconfigure Node-Red to use self-signed certs and enable authentication. Now you have access to the GUI to create flows as well as webpages within the flow. I have a nice discussion how to do everything from hardware on up here:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;crankylinuxuser.net&#x2F;2015&#x2F;10&#x2F;17&#x2F;so-you-wanna-iot-a-howto-on-internet-of-things-1-of-many&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;crankylinuxuser.net&#x2F;2015&#x2F;10&#x2F;17&#x2F;so-you-wanna-iot-a-ho...</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;crankylinuxuser.net&#x2F;2016&#x2F;01&#x2F;05&#x2F;so-you-wanna-iot-a-howto-on-internet-of-things-2-of&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;crankylinuxuser.net&#x2F;2016&#x2F;01&#x2F;05&#x2F;so-you-wanna-iot-a-ho...</a><p>But in a nutshell, TOR isn&#x27;t just for anonymizing, secure internet. It&#x27;s also great for punching holes in firewalls and NATs and stuff to provide a service anyone can get to. Just be smart about it, secure the open ports down, and keep your onion site hidden as well.<p>I&#x27;ve been railed against before for my unpopular opinions regarding this topic. But things are only going to get worse with every company who decides to reinvent the wheel, so they can have your data. And not to mention pilfering your data, does the idea of &quot;No Internet, no House automation&quot; sound like a good idea?