Kevin and I kick off the show with the news that Google is moving ahead on its local control for certain smart home devices, which will be helpful for people who want faster response times and a bit more privacy. We also discuss the FCC’s approval to make Wi-Fi 6 E spectrum available. From there we speculate about the Ring Doorbox and Apple Tags products before jumping into news from Ecobee on support for multi-factor authentication and a new subscription filter business. After that, we explore the idea of a mesh network in space, a smart toilet and discuss a peer-to-peer app for track and trace. After all of this, we answer a question from a listener about how to handle smart devices during power outages. 
Image courtesy of Google.
This week’s guest is Alex Kubicek, the CEO of Understory, a startup that began life as an IoT weather sensor company and is now an insurance provider. Kubicek talks about why the company had to build its own gear and bypass the insurance market in order to succeed. He also anticipates where we’re going to see data-driven insurance go next. As a bonus, he offers a detailed account of how hail insurance works in my former home state of Texas. Exciting!
I suspect they don’t use weight to identify who is on the toilet seat because that is not a robust identifier.
A few of the ways it would not be reliable:
Peoples weight changes significantly over the course of hours and it’s worse over longer time frames
People in the household may have overlapping normal weight ranges as their weight fluctuates
People would have to lift their feet off the floor to get a consistent weight reading between uses
On top of that adding an accurate weight measurement function to the seat might be expensive (how many sit on scales for adults exist?)