[Data Sharing and Privacy 1.0]

[diegopau]

Initial Specifications:

Data privacy control from the Pod Companion app

Pod users should have full control about what data they share with our cloud server. There will be some specific thresholds that will trigger very specific data sending to the cloud server regardless of what the user privacy settings are, but that’s just the necessary data for communicating Ocean Builders staff that a serious issue is happening in a pod and needs intervention.

1. Currently, our pod users do not authenticate with Cognito or create an account in the cloud database. For now, their accounts are stored locally in each HA instance. Also, if a person happens to own 2 or more pods, then that person will need as many different HA accounts, created in each of the pods servers. So, considering all this, for now when a user logs in for the first time we should show a page/popup to the user with switches for each of the possible groups of datapoints that can be shared.
   The switches will all be set to off by default.
   At the top of that page, we should show a title saying “Your pod data”. Then immediately below:
   “Choose which of your pod data do you want to share with Ocean Builders. This includes numeric data about your pod resources and will never include videos, audio or text shared by any of the pod residents.”. Then, immediately below, and highlighted so it is clear that it can be tapped: “Find out how sharing some of your pod data benefits you and other pods around you.”.

2. If they tap on: “Find out how sharing some of your pod data benefits you and other pods around you.” Then we will open another page showing the following text for now:
   “You own all the data from all the different sensors installed in your pod. The data is processed and stored in your pod’s brain computer. A backup of all the data stored is available in the backup computer.
   Data will be sent to Ocean Builders servers only if:

   • You decide to share with Ocean Builders some of the data being captured by your pod’s sensors.
   • In rare occasions, there might be values picked by your pod sensors that clearly show a dangerous condition in your home. These creates what we call an “alarm event” that sends data to Ocean Builders servers so we can act immediately and help preventing any material and/or personal damage. In the table below we list all the possible alarm events that can be triggered and we show exactly what data is being sent to Ocean Builders servers.
     {Table to be added later}”
     This page should be full screen and have a way to close it so the user comes back to the list of switches to choose what to share.

3. The page that shows the switches to turn on whatever the owner wants to share must be dynamically built from the database of sensors available in Home Assistant. Ideally the sensors of the pod are grouped in Home Assistant in a way that the switches turn on or off the sharing of data for each of the groups of sensors.

4. The owner can scroll down the page and tap in “Save settings” to get rid of the page. The page should also be available to open anytime from a new “Data & Privacy” option in the sidebar.

5. When a switch for a group of sensors is off, it means that the Home Assistant server of that pod cannot send post requests to AWS related to that group of sensors.

Pod Companion app will show anonymized statistics of resource usage of other pods in the area.
In the sidebar of the app we will have a new tab named “Your community” (totally temporary name). When tapping there will be some super basic information about other pods that belong to the same area/zone:

• Number of pods of each model. For example: 10 EcoPods, 5 SeaPods.
• Average weekly use of different resources. This will work this way: the pod owner can access anonymized statistics about how other pods use different resources (water, power) for each group of sensors BUT that data will only be available for the same model of pod and for the same groups of sensors that the owner has chosen to share data. So if the owner shares data for the kitchen power sensors then the owner can see statistics about what the power consumption for other pods looks like in average. We can later on discuss this further and determine how to present this data and other details. There should be an option to calculate the average resource usage per person (instead of per pod), so dividing the usage of the pod by the number of people currently living in the pod, that will be giving a more useful idea of how much other people are spending resources.
  This would be just the initial steps of a more ambitious feature. We plan to give a full service of advising how to better use the resources of their pod to save energy and money and good insights on how well they are doing compared to other pods. All this available only if they choose to share their own pod data.

Admin dashboard changes to accommodate data privacy options
Pod owners can switch off the sharing of certain groups of sensors for their pod. This means that the Admin Dashboard has to be ready for the scenarios in which pods share partial amount of data, no data at all, or all data.

Threshold for alarm events
The Home Assistant brain computer must have set a series of events that are reason to notify Ocean Builders staff immediately, and without any choice for the pod owners to disable this functionality (except, obviously, if there is no internet connectivity then the alarm will never reach our servers).
For now, we can start with following events: Bilge pump failure, water leak in the bilge, fire, critical instability (using accelerometer settings), pressing emergency panic button (which we don't currently have), activating discrete Gesture AI alarm. We will add more events as soon as we discuss this further. We should ideally configure all pods with the same threshold values, so they all behave in the same way.
What happens when an alarm event is triggered?

• The brain computer must be sent the information to AWS. Since this is an alarm, the message must show immediately to the Dashboard admin users so we need to push these in real time (and show them a notification once we have notifications implemented in the admin dashboard).
• All the users with the Pod Companion app installed must get a notification indicating the reason for the alarm, the recommended action to take and indicating that the essential data for this event has been sent to Ocean Builders staff.