Is there a way to keep family members from controling devices?

So my situation is that my daughter who is away at college thinks it’s hilarious to turn on lights at the house. It’s not a huge issue and it actually is (was) kind of funny but it sent me looking at settings to see if that’s something we can control.

Is there a way to allow access (I obviously would never boot her out of the system completely) but restrict certain actions like turning on lights remotely?

Why not? If she’s away at college, what possible need does she have to control the devices in your home? And if you can’t trust her to refrain from abusing the access she has (however funny it might have been at first) then cutting her off from it…at least temporarily…might help to make the point.

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  1. Don’t install SmartThings app on their phones.
  2. Give them SmartThings Presence Sensor devices.
  3. Install SmartTiles on a tablets and only give them access to their room.
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I would second @lmosenko 's suggestion that you look at SmartTiles. It’s a very popular customizable dashboard which was initially created by a community member who had two kids who thought it was funny to turn off the lights in the other one’s room.

Then they don’t need to have the official Smart things mobile app. And as was also suggested, if you want presence Detection for them you can either give them the arrival sensor or you can use IFTTT presence or Life360.

FAQ: The Many Ways of Detecting Presence

So it’s a little more work to set up, but you can definitely accomplish the end goal. It comes up with housemates and landlord/tenant situations as well. It would be nice if the official features had a way to manage this, but at least there are good workarounds. :sunglasses:

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Thanks for the input… It’s really not a big deal and she would stop if I told her to (which I haven’t done because it hasn’t been a problem). I just started thinking about other instances where it might be helpful to have someone with access but not FULL access to the system. Having the same person repeatedly house-sit while we are on vacation is an example of when I wouldn’t mind them having control but be able to toggle that user on and off.

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The nice thing about smarttiles is it gives them the ability to turn the selected devices on and off, but not the ability to delete devices or rules. So it basically takes them out of admin mode. :sunglasses:

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LOL! I didn’t know there are legends about me! Great story, but in reality, I have 3 kids, one just discovered light switches and his first words are “Ok, Google”, the other two are sleeping in the same room and none have access to mobile devices. It was my wife who inspired me to create SmartTiles.

Thanks for spreading the word thought!

The upcoming reboot of SmartTiles as ActionTiles includes multi-user support. It’s much smoother than the current implementation with better session control and each user having their own credentials.

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Maybe that was a use case discussion? I can see part of the original post in my head, if it’s easy to track down I’ll find it. I’m pretty sure it was while SmartTiles was still called ActiON. :sunglasses:

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Well, it’s certainly a very popular use case. Might be on some of our marketing materials.

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Found it, November 2014, but it wasn’t you, it was one of the early users. My bad. :sunglasses:

I read that the first week I joined the forum. Didn’t have all the containers built yet in memory to store the posts. :building_construction:

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I recall that thread. Wow, that takes me back.

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