Comment on Refrigerator ads are finally here!

Osan@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

• Aeri@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ 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.

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  • Osan@lemmy.world ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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.

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  • UltraMagnus@startrek.website ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ 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

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• TigerAce@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  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.

  arxiv.org/abs/1909.09848

  The following is an academic paper on how even encrypted data isn’t safe from Smart devices. Bit off topic, but still interesting.

  arxiv.org/abs/1808.02741

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  • Osan@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    I tried to find the article again but all I can find is stores selling smart fridges etc. Search engines are broken.

    I was able to find some links using duckduckgo including the same article from “Tomshardware” so at least that still works.

    Again I don’t know why a washing machine would need an internet connection it’s not like you can remotely load it.

    I mean I do understand the appeal and usefulness of smart homes and some IoT devices but companies are pushing AI and internet connectivity like it’s some kind of magic that makes any product better. I mean it would be nice to have a centralised panel to view your usage patterns and consumption but even then you don’t need all this overpowered tech stuff.

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• thatKamGuy@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  The whole selling points was to track fridge contents via cameras so that not only could you ‚see’ inside without having to open the door - theoretically saving electricity, using AI it was supposed to be able to track expiry dates, and suggest shopping lists in order to have full recipes.

  Additionally it had all the usual „smart home” integrations on top of that.

  But let’s be honest, the whole point was just to put in yet another screen that vendors could sell advertisements on, as well as track/sell personal information.

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• thethunderwolf@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  For no good reason whatsoever

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