Your washing machine could be sending 3.7 GB of data a day — LG washing machine owner disconnected his device from Wi-Fi after noticing excessive outgoing daily data traffic
Your washing machine could be sending 3.7 GB of data a day — LG washing machine owner disconnected his device from Wi-Fi after noticing excessive outgoing daily data traffic
The owner was puzzled why a clothes washer would need so much data.
LG's app is an absolute privacy nightmare too. That app must be used if you want access to any smart appliance features and it requires precise location permissions 100% of the time. Even then, the app features are mediocre, it doesn't work very well and often doesn't notify of a finished wash load until long after it's completed.
Why anyone would want to allow their washing machine manufacturer to continuously track their exact location in exchange for some crappy, poorly implemented features is beyond me.
It really irritates me when IoT devices force you to use "the cloud" for access. My home automation consists of roughly 100 devices. The vast majority are Zigbee, but a few use wifi. With the exception of my irrigation controller, all the wifi devices are blocked at the firewall from accessing the internet. The fact that I have to send a command half way across the country to a remote server only so it can send it right back to my home network when I want to change the watering schedule for my plants is ridiculous. Sure, I could buy a different controller, but I already spent $300 once. I'm not doing it again.
Plot twist: it was the Asus router misreporting the amount of data.
Bought “smart” LG fridge, range and dishwasher a couple of years ago and never connected any of them, they function like they are supposed to, refrigerate, heat food and clean dirty dishes. No need to connect.
Fridge manual explained something like “in case of peak energy consumption your smart energy company can send a signal to your fridge to not use power”. What the heck do I need that for? To find spoiled food and mold growing in the fridge later on?
Why does one need to connect a range to WiFi?
There are probably 3 main groups of people with WiFi appliances:
- The vast majority of people don't care, and put it on their normal WiFi router and would never notice something like this
- A smaller group of people don't care much, but pay attention to their bandwidth usage and would spot an appliance trying to send 3.7 GB of data a day
- A much smaller group of people are paranoid and would put the device on its own isolated subnet, or use firewall-type features to limit the access their appliances have to the Internet.
My guess is that if this were a widespread problem, people in the second group would notice, or would have immediately checked and chimed in and said "holy crap, mine is doing this too". I didn't hear many people saying that, so I'm guessing this is a bug, and it's either a one-off weirdness, or it's a bug related to people in group 3 who are blocking their appliances from being able to connect to the Internet.
It's probably something as simple as a badly programmed firmware update check that doesn't do exponential backoff when it fails. It probably connects, fails, then immediately tries again. A proper exponential backoff would wait before trying again, and if it failed again it would double the wait time down to some minimum value like once per day or something.
Incidentally, this is also why claims about smartphones monitoring people's conversations when they're supposedly off is BS. That would require either huge amounts of bandwidth to transmit all the conversations, or huge amounts of computing power inside the phone to decode the voices. Either way you'd be using tons of battery, and probably a significant amount of bandwidth. There are enough paranoid people out there that if this were a real thing, someone would have caught the devices doing it by now.
I have a similar model washer/dryer and refuse to put it on my wifi. I only want it to wash and dry.
Tomorrow is my turn to post about this
My Xerox 6510 pings Google every second. It made it hard to go through my AdGuard Home logs, so no it is banned from DNS.
I was looking at one of those new washer/dryer combo units recently (I have heard these are common in Europe but they are fairly new to the US market) and it had a unique feature where you could fill the detergent reservoir, scan the barcode on the bottle, and the machine would dispense the appropriate amount of detergent for the load.
I can see connecting to the Internet on occasion might be helpful here to update the local barcode database, but I doubt it should need updating more often than once or twice a year. Does that mean the feature will work without constant live updates? Probably not, but I doubt it needs to update very often to remain current.
I need internet for reasons proceeds to send visual and audio recordings
Permanently Deleted
Meh. It's an article based on a guy who didn't even see what the data it was sending was our even if it was bugged
I'm loving the puns quoted in the article haha
I have this really complicated home setup where I have these little switches on the walls and they control the lights it's very clever.
With home automation sure I could turn the lights on and off in a room I'm not in but since I'm not in that room I don't see the point. Anyway I can just pretend I've done that and then I'm not in the room so I won't know it hasn't happened. I really don't see the point.
You can get home automated door locks, why. In what scenario would you ever want to unlock the door except when you're in front of the door?