Recently I read an article about smart devices uploading and downloading over 1GB per day. I tried to find the article again but all I can find is stores selling smart fridges etc. Search engines are broken. I asked chatgpt, which was able to find articles. How fucked is this. Boring dystopia. Anyway, here are some sources.
tomshardware.com/…/your-washing-machine-could-be-…
www.reddit.com/r/smarthome/s/F5ETernz6f
www.reddit.com/r/SmartThings/s/HY2E0uOBiH
In the following article they talk about devices sending up to 19MB per week, but only text (so again insane amounts of data considering it’s only text).
consumerreports.org/…/smart-appliances-and-privac…
The following is about researchers finding lots of thirst party domains when analyzing IoT traffic from Smart devices.
The following is an academic paper on how even encrypted data isn’t safe from Smart devices. Bit off topic, but still interesting.
Aeri@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I’m not defending this practice because it’s remarkably awful but I will note that I have a router that lets me monitor the traffic that individual devices use and most smart devices like this actually use incredibly small amounts of bandwidth. Our smart water tank uses ~10 MB a month which is smaller than most images.
And yes I do think a smart water tank is valid because it can do shit like tell me when it thinks it’s about to explode or leak or whatever and it can also like, be remote controlled, and it has a heat pump which is nice.
UltraMagnus@startrek.website 3 weeks ago
I suppose I’d want to know if my fridge was about to explode… /s
In seriousness, though, you’re right - the problem isn’t with the technology, it’s how the technology is used
Osan@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I’m also not against automation or making machines “smart” it’s just that what companies are marketing nowadays is just mostly overpriced shit.
And by consuming bandwidth I didn’t mean for the indented usage I was mostly talking about the ads which will probably be filled with unnecessary metadata, trackers, unnecessarily large CSS files (if it was web based) and maybe high quality images. All of these things I find completely unnecessary.
Also coming from a computer engineering background if I was living in a “smart households” I would probably want to set up my own firewall. And like I said while I like the idea of home automation I don’t want a corporation to be able to control or access my appliances too.