That SMART acronym is for internal computer drives, has been in use since about 1995, and is a wonderful thing - the drive keeps track of how many errors it encounters reading, how many bad sectors on the drive, how many hours it's been powered on, and a whole bunch of other stats.

And then, you, the user (/sysadmin) can, while sitting at the computer, get a report of all these stats and notice if the drive is starting to fail so you can plan a replacement instead of it just dying unexpectedly.

Someone might have made an acronym for "smart" light bulbs, but it would be completely unrelated to the internal computer drive acronym.

@AbraNidoran@beehaw.org already took care of what SMART means and is good for, so, I'll address what the spirit of your message instead.

For me, _almost _nothing in my house phones back anywhere with telemetry. Sure, anything that uses WiFi needs the network to run, but almost nothing has access to the actual internet because it's on a VLAN that specifically blocks internet access.

If you plan out the equipment you buy, you can ensure it's safe (the absolute easiest way to do that would be to only buy z-wave or zigbee equipment since by design that's a completely offline ecosystem, unless you buy a controller for it that requires the internet). With WiFi, I basically only buy stuff that can be flashed to ESPHOME, which removes its online requirements and puts a completely different firmware on the devices ... this is more work than most people would want to do though, but you can always buy devices that were already flashed by someone else. IIRC, there are even some devices that come that way from the factory and use ESPHOME as an option. Or, they're devices where I bought the sensors and microcontrollers and wired them up myself and put ESPHOME on the microcontroller.

For me, I love walking into a room and the lights turning on. If it's night, the lights are red to not jolt me awake. Later in the night, they're dim and a bit more orangey rather than bright white. These are QOL improvements that I would not want to go back to not having.

My garage doesn't have any of the standard RF "clickers"/4-digit-code-panels connected because they're garbage, but I have a relay sitting on it that I can remotely trigger and open the garage. I have motion sensors so that if no one has been in the garage for the last 5 minutes and the door is open, it'll close the garage door (this was because people kept forgetting it was open.) I have sensors to let me know when the windows are open at the same time as the heating/air conditioning to try and prevent burning money. None of this is internet enabled, but it is controllable over my network and my network is accessible over my VPN.

If the humidity is high in the bathrooms, it assumes someone is taking a shower and turns on the exhaust fans if they're not already on. This can help prevent mold from growing. There are some real benefits to things being smart and I do 100% agree with you that apps that send data to companies on when we're home/away and all that are BAD, but, if you plan ahead you can have your cake and eat it too, but the number of choices for equipment you'll have will be lower, but at least your stuff will keep working regardless of internet access and regardless of whether the company that made the equipment is still around or not.