Your washing machine could be sending 3.7 GB of data a day — LG washing machine owner disconnected his device from Wi-Fi after noticing excessive outgoing daily data traffic
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.
Its a good reason to allow wifi but there is no reason for you to receive such a notification unless your home to act on it, otherwise your better of receiving the notification once your phone reconnect with your homes wifi.
Wifi isnt the same as internet.
There is sometimes but rarely a good reason for those same decides to connect to the public web. They are much more secure if everything stays local.
The prime reason companies claim they need internet so you can set up things like stop heat when i am not home…. But guess what, if my phone isnt activity at home connecting to wifi, my home server can figure it out on its own, no cloud required.
So I actually have one that does.
I get notifications when laundry is done.
I get a notification when I need to do routine maintenance like change filters, or refill the detergent. (It has a built-in jug and dispenser)
I can send it settings via the app, which is easier than via the built in controls. (It has things like extra rinse, wash times for different rinses, and steaming and stuff). It's not impossible to do via the interface, but it's a bit easier via the phone.
The one I had also sent me a notification if the clothes were too humid after the drying cycle, so I could add more minutes to it. That was a Samsung tho
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.
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.
I don't have a wifi active washing machine, but I have a dryer on wifi, and to answer your question, I have ADHD and frequently forget there's even laundry. Like as a concept.
So I turned on my dryer's wifi and now when it's done, I get a notification. Which allows me to come downstairs and fold what's in there (and put the stuff from the washer into the dryer).
Before I would turn on the dryer (and washer) and then have go wash clothes again because they went sour on me. So wasteful! Made me ashamed! Hopefully I won't go blind to dryer notifications...
Legitimately, I want one exclusively so I can get told the wash is done and then I can put it on for an extra spin all from the pub round the corner from my house and then arrive home just as it's finishing
So I never would have bothered. We built a new house and the set we got came with Wi-Fi (not a feature I cared about) and it was actually really helpful to have notifications. I have a family and kids and they don't always watch when things are done. So now I can catch when cycles are done as sensor cycles can be highly variable.
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:
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.
Crypto mining would be symmetrical up/down though. This is only a small amount of data downloaded, and a huge amount uploaded. That looks more like a botnet attack, where an attacker hacked the machine and pointed it at a target, then just left it to run.
Zigbee and zwave are fully local. They can’t decide to phone home over the protocols without your consent. The hubs can if they are wifi connected but that’s a different issue.
Anything on a network, be it wifi or Ethernet, can (attempt to) phone home without any use intervention, and without a wifi connected hub.
I'm a little new to this stuff myself, but basically those devices are robust enough to get the job done but also simple enough that they don't do anything else. I have Z-Wave for my shades, a temperature/humidity sensor, a tilt sensor for my garage door, a relay for the opener, and a light switch/scene controller for some physical button shortcuts. Very different things, and I don't need an app from each manufacturer. Each device also creates a mesh network with one another, so these devices can have a pretty low-power, low overhead radio for battery life and still work pretty well even if you're reaching far away from your hub.
I haven't used Zigbee but I understand it works pretty similarly. They seem to have some pretty cheap scene controllers so I was thinking of getting on that bandwagon (my shades were Z-Wave and that's what got me into this rabbit hole so I've been using that to start)
Also, an honorable mention for TP-Link's Kasa series. Hardware is pretty solid and while I do need their app to get a device going, it's made pretty well and integrates nicely to Home Assistant. Now if only they'll put out that fan controller they announced a year ago and haven't given a meaningful update over since!
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
Any device that requires an app to function is an immediate deal breaker for me. Same for most things that require "the cloud" to work. Garage door openers, doorbell or other cameras, cooking appliances, door locks, cars, even a basic pedometer to name a few. All of these things will only work temporarily until the company decides it's end of life for any reason.
Yes, that's another reason. I'm reliant on the app for the device to function - if they stop supporting it, the company goes bankrupt, my wifi cuts out - I now have a very expensive piece of plastic.
It could be a cost issue. A chip that collects data from connected sensors and sends it via Wifi is small and cheap. Adding a display and buttons ads size, complexitiy and costs. Therefore manufacturers offload the interface to an app and a device you already own, and they can update without expensive recalls.
If the task or device is more complicated and the device would also need it's own storage, CPU, display, sound etc. the product costs could go up by hundreds of dollars, depending on functionality and how many units they plan to ship.
I also hate apps. Still have my 2010 smartphone in a drawer that still turns on, however it;s useless because google playstore, maps and email now used an more modern SSL standard that this phone does not support anymore, and it won't receive any updates. I expect the same will happen to a lot of devices that are controlled by apps when the manufacturer decides he won't support it anymore, or Google breaks the app because some new protocol must be supported now that didn't exist 2 years ago when the app came out.
Lets not pretend that it isn't about data collection though. If they cared about protecting my data, they'd spend a little more money and either make 0.1% less profit or pass the cost onto the consumer
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?
That's a great idea! You can check your salt levels while at work or on vacation. You could even have your salt shaker automatically order more salt from Amazon when the level got too low. Or how about you program your maximum daily salt intake so it closes up when it's reached.
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
Notify you when a cycle is done, but you could do that with a vibration sensor over zigbee and home assistant, or an outlet power monitor.
People simply don't understand there are other low-band wireless local communication protocols other than wifi and maybe IR, and that is completely taken advantage of by companies who deal in user data.
I do use the timer delay to run the wash cycle when the power is cheap. I'd really like it if I could set it as "ready to go" and something else give it the "go" when the power is cheap.
Once I have that, it's also useful to have something to tell me there's wet washing that needs to be unloaded.
If my washing machine was older I could do all of this with a remote power switch and sensor, but because my washing machine has touch buttons instead of click/clacks, I can't. Turning the power on just makes it wait for a button press.
Cameras - remote access and recording
TV - access streaming
The rest can fuck off, medical devices can have useful functions associated like being able to change settings and get stats from the device but the implementation is poor a lot of the time.
It's possible that it had some vulnerability which was automatically exploited by one of her majesty's secret services (perhaps with help from their US counterparts) to make it a component of their covert infrastructure.
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.
My LG washer needed a key printed on a label on the door to connect it to the network. However that isn't to say that once on the network that the network itself wasn't compromised and the washer found as an easy attack surface.
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.
The reason is so you can control it from anywhere without setting up port forwarding and a static IP. Most people don't understand, or can be bothered, doing that. I get why you don't like it, I wouldn't like it either, but it's not some conspiracy.
It would be far better if somebody sold a single VPN device for the mass public to be able to access home devices. Something wireguard based could be so simple for people to use. Even better if your ISP had this as a standard feature which they made easy to setup Then none of these devices would have an excuse to go out to the company's servers. Any that did would be obviously spying and they could be shamed.
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.
I remember when Tom’s hardware was one German dentist and washing machines were to primitive to pick up a phone… you’d think they’d have done something cool by now like make them fold our clothes for us. The future is lame.
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.
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
I once heard of a toaster that could download patterns (character faces and so forth) then burn them onto your toast. Totally novelty but kinda cool if you could have Batman toast with breakfast. I don't know if it actually exists as a product or was just a proof of concept though.
Bloatware has spiraled out of control. It's a consequence of coding becoming easy and accessible. Programming is no longer the domain of idealistic nerds. It is possible for anyone to make garbage tech wares.
Wait, wait, wait. Let's not aim at the wrong thing. Programming becoming accessible is a great, and is not the cause of bloat. Bloat is not even something that can be easily pointed to a single cause, and a lot of things played a role, like poor tech education, companies not giving a fuck and relying on hardware replacement, lack of regulations, big tech corporations having practically monopolies and no incentive to create better products, the high demands of timing for projects, etc.
No reason really. The machine could be smart and start when the electricity is cheaper. But it could probably be solved just as easily by a delayed timer, that would work well enough for the purpose, and also offline.
The real reason is that they want to collect data about how their products are being used, I find that a bit too intrusive for a home appliance machine. But I work in IT so naturally I am averse to everything that beeps and needs an app or internet connection.. so take my grumpiness for what it is.
Who would buy a washing machine with internet access? Why? Not feeling like you are giving enoigh of your privacy and personal data to Google or FB or Apple? They should just sign up to TikTok, much cheaper.