This should be illegal unless the data format is open, documented and user can turn it off or set their own endpoint or their preferred repairer.
LG washing machine sending 3.7GB of data a day
131–140 of 256 posts
Re: LG washing machine sending 3.7GB of data a day
#132I'm not opposed to smart homes, I love being able to turn my lights on and off from across the room. But I don't know if I understand the use case for a networked washing machine.
Our washing machine and dryer are networked (Bosch). Current benefits are secondary reasons and I could live without them:
- Notifications when done: Nice, but a beeper would work, too.
- Select program via App, based on what I put into the machine: Occasionally useful when I'm not sure. Also, I can put in my wife's cloths and let her pick the correct program (I did that wrong once and we both don't want that to happen anymore).
- The dryer can load the correct settings based on the washing machine's last cycle. Very convenient.
What's planned (primary reason): Our photovoltaic is also networked, so the plan is to eventually start the cycle when we get energy for essentially free. This saves us money and allows us to use more clean energy instead of the grid mix. I guess the non-smart variant also supports this by setting the "finished in x hours".
What I don't like: Our smart home is fully offline, except for these two appliances. I thought there was a local API, but last time I checked I could not find the info anymore. Also, they sometimes lose connectivity to their cloud (not sure why, maybe hick-ups after that archaic 24h disconnect) and need to be restarted to reconnect.
Edit: Ah, mind we did first replace the old, power-wasting dryer with the new one (amortized after ~2y). Later when the old washing machine started failing, we got this one (which is also better suited for our needs, regarding size; and generally uses less water IIRC). I wouldn't have replaced good units for the sake of smartness. Obviously we could have saved some money by getting more basic appliances, but we had good timing on offers.
Re: LG washing machine sending 3.7GB of data a day
#133I'm not opposed to smart homes, I love being able to turn my lights on and off from across the room. But I don't know if I understand the use case for a networked washing machine.
I'm totally with you, except a notification that it's finished would actually be really helpful. It's apparently possible to track a washing machine's progress with a smart switch that monitors power draw; I've got one lying around so might try to implement that soon, to complement my hacky RPi-Ring-doorbell-announcer :)
You can use Bluetooth for that though, and it would probably be cheaper.
Re: LG washing machine sending 3.7GB of data a day
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
The random MAC would still be within the vendor prefix though, and a MAC address won’t identity a specific device type anyway. Edit: I’m wrong
No it isn’t, vendor prefixes are sort of an anachronism. Bit 41 - bit 1 of the first octet is reserved for local (random) use. That and the group bit (40) set to 0 means the second digit of the human readable MAC is 2, 6, A or E, but that’s it.
My bad, thanks for the correction! You still can’t identify a specific device type based on the MAC address though, right?
Re: LG washing machine sending 3.7GB of data a day
#135I'm not opposed to smart homes, I love being able to turn my lights on and off from across the room. But I don't know if I understand the use case for a networked washing machine.
Really? “Hey your washing is done, come move it to the dryer.”
“Hey, it’s been a year since you replaced your filters.”
Re: LG washing machine sending 3.7GB of data a day
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even dumber: I sense when the washer door has been closed longer than 70 minutes (the longest cycle is just shy of that), and start making a loud noise, which continues until the door is opened. Simple as that, no wireless components required. I simply leave the door open when the machine isn't running.
People want notifications so they knew immediately when the laundry is ready: Either to take it out before it gets musty, or to start another load as soon as possible.
I have the very simple one. I can hear it across the apartment, because the spinning is noticeable. The actual washing is even louder.
Re: LG washing machine sending 3.7GB of data a day
#137Why hasn't anyone mentioned a botnet yet? Those devices are perfect targets for Mirai clones. (yes, you still cannot run a mailserver at home, currently because we live in the age of Internet of Shit).
Most people in the reddit thread I saw seemed to assume botnet.
I'm not convinced though. That would assume that the washing machine was opening an external port on the user's router, which seems unlikely. I looked up a manual for one of the the washers which has the "ThinQ" feature and there's no mention of UPnP.
Re: LG washing machine sending 3.7GB of data a day
#138I'm not opposed to smart homes, I love being able to turn my lights on and off from across the room. But I don't know if I understand the use case for a networked washing machine.
Well, clearly if manufacturers want to continue making their machines less like they used to, they'll need all the analytics they can get to figure out which A/B tested engineered failures result in the lowest continued usage.
Re: LG washing machine sending 3.7GB of data a day
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> A megabyte is a LOT of data.
Well it is, but in this Cloud Native world the clueless management and IT engineers have been convinced that single micro service running on 50 kubernetes pods and generating 20 MB trace logs for single transaction is normal.
Now once we have built this inefficiency industry wide nobody is there to wake the management up about huge wastage of resources. They are floating in this lurid dream of "ultra smart" machines generating gigabytes of precious intelligence about customer behavior for target ads
Re: LG washing machine sending 3.7GB of data a day
#140This should be illegal unless the data format is open, documented and user can turn it off or set their own endpoint or their preferred repairer.
Or you could just not buy one