That’s data laundering
Privacy
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
Chat rooms
-
[Matrix/Element]Dead
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
Why would you connect your washing machine to WiFi in the first place? Like legitimate question.
Because water is held in cloud storage
::slow clap::
Well played, friend. Well played.
To get notifications when your laundry is done.
As someone with adhd, I could see it being super helpful for me.
Fair point, I didn't think of that. Any IoT device gets put in the "naughty" vlan and 99% of their outgoing requests goes straight to /Dev/null
I do the same thing. All they're allowed to talk to is Home Assistant except for when I allow internet access to update firmware.
My dryer is as dumb as they come. It just beeps like a motherfucker until I open the door, which is pretty effective.
I have an lg machine with notifications… it’s very helpful.
We have two young kids, laundry is constant.
FWIW I accomplish this with a zigbee outlet on the washer and dryer (dryer is gas, so it's not a 50a circuit). It has stats on power consumption and I have a home assistant sensor set up so that when it drops below a threshold for a period of time, it counts the washer/dryer as off and notifies me.
Joke Answer: Just ask Pied Piper about their fridges.
Non-Joke Answer:
Not personally owned washers of course:
I live in a set of apartments and we have a laundry room and the quarter slots have been removed entirely and now you have to pay for your laundry with an app and Bluetooth.
In other words, it could be fucking worse and you might not have a choice because your landlords don't give a shit about poor people (who may not have a device capable of running the app).
EDIT: The bonus? The notifications on when your laundry is done don't even work properly and are consistently wrong. I still just set a timer.
Thats wild. We had laundry cards.
I have an LG washer/dryer. With the app you can add downloaded cycle programs. And you can just have one at the time, and there are two cycles I sometimes swap between. It also gives me a notice when it needs to be cleaned and it has smart diagnostics when something goes wrong. And of course delayed start via app and notification when the wash is done. So there are some benefits, but I still hate it
Not that this covers many cases, but a lot of appliances are running touch screens and a lack of non-visual indicators. Blind people could benefit from having an app with a screen reader to run the machine. Of course, this is just a patch for a problem which shouldn't have existed in the first place.
This sounds like some kind of DDOS attack like the ones that involved connected light bulbs. Malware gets into the light bulb or washing machine and repurposes the infected device to flood targeted servers:
Obligatory meme wisdom:
https://biggaybunny.tumblr.com/post/166787080920/tech-enthusiasts-everything-in-my-house-is-wired
I have an LG washer and dryer on my IoT VLAN and funneled through a pi hole. I've been pleasantly surprised at how quiet and well behaved they are on my network. Hardly ever phone home and only connect to one or two domains. Something is seriously wrong with his dudes washer.
The most noisy devices on my network are my smart TVs. The last time I bothered to look, it wasn’t even close to comparable.
My phone is my most used device. It had something in the ballpark of 800 blocked requests in a day, after an entire day of doomscrolling and heavy use. It was the third most blocked device on my network, behind both of my smart TVs. The “better” TV had ~2400 blocked requests in that same day. The worse one had nearly 3000.
I hadn’t even used my TVs that day.
some software keeps resending requests when they don't go through, so if you didn't block them, the number could've been much, much lower.
of course it's stupid and fuck that, but still.
That's a pretty silly headline for an article that quite clearly states that the issue was with the router's data usage reporting capabilities.
Smart devices are great, but if it's not Zigbee or Zwave and Home Assistant, it can fuck off.
I like my devices to be dumb but be able to function without internet.
I don't understand the craze of slapping wifi or bluetooth connectivity to everything without giving proper thought. Cameras, television, vehicles, coffee pots, medical devices, laundry machines, hipster juicers... what's next? Is my salt shaker going to have it?
Every washing machine I've owned for the last 30 years has had a delayed start function and I've never used it once, if that simple function is useless I donno what else a WiFi connection could offer
Delayed start, but from your phone, via their totally-not-tracking-infested app. That's why it needs wifi.
Not sure if I need the /s but here it is just to be sure.
I’m curious what information a wash machine is sending could be useful to anyone?
4gb is definitely a bug ... imagine getting 4gb per data per customer per day ..
It's likely been hacked by someone who guessed the default login details (when was the last time you changed the password on your washing machine), and is being used for malicious purposes such as DDoS attacks.
Hooray for IoT! The worst thing to happen to network security since... ever
I've been looking for a breast pump recently - I'd like electric so I don't have to manually pump. All of the ones I could find in the shop required an app to connect to the device. Why? What purpose does that serve me? I'd have to make an account, accept needless permissions and cookies and give them access to very personal data about my boobs and milk production - I went with a manual one instead
My heat pump can be controlled by an app but it all goes through an external web page for some reason so I noped out of it.
It only would be a big problem if household devices like washing machines are built in a way that makes a connection to the internet mandatory in order to function properly. Imagine you can't do your laundry because of an internet outage.
Name any household device (washing machine, dishwasher, dryer, toaster, water kettle, iron, coffee maker, (microwave) oven, ...) that has been improved in functionality by connecting it to the internet, making it a internet-of-things-device. I can't think of any.
We have a washing machine that cannot be connected to the internet. After starting the program, we set up a timer on our smartphone, 15 minutes longer than the time the washing machine display is predicting. Works like a charm.
Do not buy BS internet connected devices period. There was a time when internet connected devices did exactly they were supposed to do and nothing more. There is literally no reason why most of these devices can't act as their own server and keep your data local and private. Corporations have become far too greedy to trust their cloud won't sell you out in every way it can. The ONLY two reasons a manufacturer adds internet connectivity are:
-
To monitor and collect as much data as possible and/or:
-
To implement a subscription service for something that normally wouldn't require monthly payments.
Corporate closed clouds have proven time and time again that they can't be trusted.
For now, it looks like the favored answer to the data mystery is to blame Asus for misreporting it. We may never know what happened with Johnie, who is now running his LG washing machine offline.
Another relatively innocent reason for the supposed high volume of uploads could be an error in the Asus router firmware. In a follow-up post a day after his initial Tweet, Johnie noted “inaccuracy in the ASUS router tool.” Other LG smart washing machine users showed device data use from their apps. It turns out that these appliances more typically use less than 1MB per day.
Verbosity level 99999
It’s an older meme sir, but it checks out.
If you bought a washing machine that needs Internet access you are a fucking idiot.
They don't need wifi, so no, you're not an idiot if you buy one and just leave it disconnected
What program is that?
Looks like Synthetics and Cottons at 60° and 1200RPM. But my guess is that all programs will send data.