81–90 of 256 posts
For those who do not want WiFi on their appliances you still can get highly rated reasonably priced washing machines without WiFi, even from the companies that are putting WiFi in nearly everything. E.g., I recently bought an LG WM3400CW washing machine for $650. On Consumer Reports it is tied for 3rd on the front loader ratings list. The LG 3900 and 4000 are tied for #1 with overall scores of 87, then the 3400, 8900…
I created a wifi network for most of the smart appliances at home. It's nice that Unifi hardware lets you choose some of the higher-level wifi protocol options per-network, so I have a modern roaming-enabled 802.11 5GHz network for most devices, and the legacy 2.4GHz one for the fridge and stove to make use of.
Most routers have a "guest network" - that's where all my smart devices live.
Assuming I'd be stupid enough to have a "smart" washing machine, in this case I would've immediately started capturing packets to determine what's going on. Apparently it was a misreporting(!) in the router's firmware, but the opaqueness of modern technology (and the ignorance it tends to perpetuate) can be very infuriating. Meanwhile my washing machine has zero electronics and is completely predictable and obvious i…
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iRobot, the robotic vacuum cleaner company that leaked photos of people on the toilet as viewed from the vacuum cleaners' cameras, is an American company. If I'm not mistaken they grew out of MIT.
That's rather cherry-picked. The information you left out: 1. Those were test units, not purchased devices used by customers. 2. For consumer Roomba devices that include a camera: photographic data is not sent to iRobot for processing. 3. The test data for the images you mentioned was leaked by a 3rd party based in Venezuela. 4. These test devices were operated by employees and volunteers in exchange for rewards. The…
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If you agree to some form of anonymous tracking for diagnostics I can see 1mb being reasonable. This would be periodic update on things like usage levels, part quality, etc. Most likely that tracking acceptance is buried in some 500 page eula, but thats a separate issue.
Why do you need an entire megabyte for that? Even if you did laundry five times a day, it shouldn't take more than a few bytes to store a few metrics. Even if you're lazy and uploaded an uncompressed JSON array of objects, that shouldn't be more than a few kB. Way less if you compress it. A megabyte is a LOT of data.
Or other things measured every ~second, like stuff related to the motor, temperatues, humidity, etc. and other diagnostics.
Seems really easy to generate a megabyte if you consider time series. Even easier if it's in XML or JSON rather than a CSV.
For those who do not want WiFi on their appliances you still can get highly rated reasonably priced washing machines without WiFi, even from the companies that are putting WiFi in nearly everything. E.g., I recently bought an LG WM3400CW washing machine for $650. On Consumer Reports it is tied for 3rd on the front loader ratings list. The LG 3900 and 4000 are tied for #1 with overall scores of 87, then the 3400, 8900…
> On models without WiFi it uses sound. The washing machine plays sounds that sound similar to the sounds that acoustic modems made back in the pre-broadband internet days. Their mobile app listens to those and extracts the diagnostics data. That's actually pretty cool! I think we should use this for more stuff to help usher in the R2-D2 future.
If I recall correctly, his washer was mining Bitcoin.
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A megabyte a day still seems excessive.
It seems completely inconsequential
I don't care if it's a small percentage of my symmetric gigabit fiber, I only care why they supposedly need it and where it ends up.
A phone number or a timestamp is a tiny amount of data.
In the quaint olden days, you had to go out of your way to volunteer to be a part of some study to have any aspect of your activity recorded every few seconds 24/7 to be collected and analysed like that.
It also doesn't matter that my washing machine usage might not seem like sensitive info. It's wrong by default rather than OK by default. You need a compelling need to justify it, not the other way around. It needs to be necessary to prevent one dead baby every day or something, not the other way around. No one needs to produce any convincing example of harm for that kind of collection to be wrong.
But even so, it's easy to point out how literally any data can end up being sensitive. Washing machine usage could lead to all kinds of assumptions like, this person does not actually live where they say they do (which impacts all kinds of things), or this person is running an illegal business, or housing too many people for the rating of the dwelling or allowed by the lease, etc, or just another data point tracking your movements in general. Or even merely to get out of 10% of warranty claims.
They've run out of their own washing-machine chips to re-use in their missiles, so they've found a way to hack into washing-machines all over the world and use those millions of chips to guide their missiles instead.