Nanoleaf

Nanoleaf
Basic information
Founded	2012
Type	Private
Industry	Consumer Electronics
Official website	https://nanoleaf.me/

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Nanoleaf is a company that specializes in LED lighting, it was founded in 2012 and launched its first products with Kickstarter funding.^[1] Nanoleaf products are highly popular with many YouTubers using them in their backdrop.

Anti-consumer practices

Nanoleaf is using GPL software in their smart home products based on OpenWrt and do not contribute back the GPL source code, or allow users to run their own software on their hardware.^[2]^[3]^[4]

Additional stub information

Nanoleaf devices collect information about the network environment they are in and submit this data to the manufacturer. This is never disclosed upon setting up the device and since the device has its own network connection via WiFi, it will stay on all the time and very aggressively send metrics. This was noted by many members of the Pi-Hole community because their nanoleaf devices would be the top consumers of DNS traffic on their network with one Nanoleaf bridge creating 100,000-300,000 DNS requests per day, attempting to reach endpoints like:

collector.nanoleaf.com
apollo.nanoleaf.com
iaso.nanoleaf.com

This traffic does not cease when the user configures their light panels to operate in LAN mode. Offlining the light panels entirely does not impede the operation of the device in any way, since control is done locally via the network over the HomeKit protocol, which does not go through Nanoleafs servers and it also does not depend on whether the user has set up or uses cloud integrations. Furthermore, these requests are made regardless of whether automatic firmware updates are enabled or not.

Nanoleaf have responded to an inquiry by a customer saying that the communication that takes place every few seconds is for "communicating to our [Nanoleaf's] cloud for various functionalities including firmware upgrade, integrating with third party services such as Google Assistant, Alexa etc."

Nanoleaf have since issued a firmware update seemingly disabling this data collection as of firmware update 5.2.1 for the original Nanoleaf Aurora panels after they were discontinued for two years. It is unconfirmed whether newer, currently sold models also had this telemetry removed.

https://forum.nanoleaf.me/forum/community-support/homecalls

https://www.reddit.com/r/Nanoleaf/comments/m35bv5/collectornanoleafme_top_talker_on_network/

https://www.reddit.com/r/Nanoleaf/comments/m8g50y/my_4_aurora_are_creating_a_total_of_137000_dns/

https://nanoleaf.me/en-EU/about-us/privacy-policy/