I have two of them, and I just checked and both are quiet. Mine don't connect to WiFi unless you go through an entire process first with an android phone and Matter.
It's great having them on WiFi - you can turn on the AC before getting home to pre-cool, without having to leave it on all day.
I have a friend who diy'ed a button on single webpage that he presses on his phone while at work in order to open the gate to the building that he lives so delivery people can get in. I also think Bret Victor diy'ed the AC as mentioned while he was a student twenty or more years ago(?)
I know this sounds like the famous "just do it this way in linux instead" criticism of Dropbox back in the day. But I do think we reached "life parodies fiction" with these smart devices where it makes sense to give diy another go. And with AI, there's less excuses this time around I would imagine.
But I would literally rather by a cheap phone, a cheap SIM, hotspot it and connect it to a charger and have the AC connect to that and isolate it that way instead of letting it touch the network.
Really? And then complain about the energy cost? People are nutz. Like it's so unbearable to come home, open windows to get peak hot air out, then turn on AC and get cool. Energy is too cheap it seems.
Also even very old AC remotes show there is usually the option to set up times etc.
Ooo. I have a Midea dehumidifier. When it powers up it displays the WiFi symbol. I wonder if it is hammering away at my access point. Might it be better to bring it on line and then just block all traffic?
And I wonder how I would even tell if it was trying to associate with my WiFi.
I actually have two dehumidifiers, one is the Midea and the second is a totally dumb Aliexpress one that cost a few tens of dollars. It's switched on and off by Home Assistant via a modbus-controlled relay and drains into a sealed water canister with a modbus water-level sensor in it. Zero-maintenance and smarter than any multi-hundred-dollar "smart" dehumidifier.
> Doubtful they just unboxed, plugged in, and it connected to the right AP and went
Why not? iirc some of the smart TVs have been shown to find open wifi networks on their own and upload data. (I'm not sure about that though. But it's plausible and undoubtedly will be implemented some day).
I've read this argument dozens of times on HN and on HN only - I'd love to see an example of that actually provably happening anywhere in the real world.
I would love to as well. It sounds like something that's plausible but potentially a minefield of liability for the manufacturer.
I could also see some kind of partnership with ISPs to use their "public" WiFi hotspots[1]. This seems more likely since it's (probably) harder to honeypot but requires making regional deals.
Well, yeah sorta since the only reason appliances connect to the internet is to steal data. I mean, if you buy a connected x that normally would not be connected, it’s 99 percent there to do nefarious stuff for its real owners. It’s like having a pet lion. Sure, it’s horribly irresponsible that someone sold you a pet lion, but. Uuuh you bought at pet lion. What did you think it was going to do?
How does this analogy go when people buy a house kitten and it turns out they have been sold a lion cub? Most people simply do not have the tech literacy to understand that what they a are buying is actually a lion, they thought they were buying a coffeemaker with some cool features. It's difficult to blame the victim when they would need to spend hours trying to understand why the thing mapping out their local network is something that they should even care about
In the analogy, there is no such thing as a house kitten. They are all lion cubs. Society needs to become aware of this, despite an ocean of fraudulent advertising to the contrary.
Since most appliances now contain a general-purpose computer, it would be unfair to say that a device is incapable of hacking or hosting malware, because any device with the given sensors and radios and capabilities can be essentially reprogrammed at any time.
So, if we're looking at smart TVs with microphones and Wi-Fi and Bluetooth and all the connectors, or if we're simply looking at a an ordinary network device, they all fall under the umbrella of general purpose computer, and there is no way to trust their maker, or some equally capable programmer, not to turn them malevolent in some future update.
I don't view this as an issue of terms of service or of software or of your manufacturer. I view this as an existential and fundamental problem with dropping general purpose computers into your home and behind your DMZ.
Consumer operating systems like Windows and Apple have all kinds of countermeasures against this malicious use. But without the proper introspection and without the proper safeguards, a device that looks special purpose but is in fact general purpose is far more dangerous.
In that context the person is a fool who shouldn’t be in charge of another life, because they’re incapable of basic prudence.
I don’t actually think that applies to coffee makers spying on people though. People shouldn’t be expected to understand how computer networks or ad tech spying works in the same way that literally any child or idiot should know the difference between a lion cub and a house cat.
How do you feel about thermostats? Are some things worth it? I've had a "smart" one for the past five years, part of a new furnace install, that I've stubbornly refused to connect to my wifi. Of course this means if we forget to turn the heat down while no one's home, there's nothing to be done about it.
Maybe that's why I've never heard of the company here in Germany.
That, plus nobody in their right mind would buy American (vs French, Italian, German, Dutch...) when it comes to coffee. (yes, Starbucks is a thing here, but I'd argue people who are into _coffee_ don't go there, people go there for other reasons.)
Tongue-in-cheek, but my Moccamaster which I bought second-hand is still doing great after 15 years. Two deep cleaning sessions in all that time and just running it with vinegar a couple of times a year seems to be all it needs.
The device is dead simple. No advanced electronics. Nothing complex that can break. Just a coffee maker fine-tuned to near perfection.
The only flaw it has is the handle for the pot. I've resorted to replacing the plastic handle with a fancy walnut one I made myself. I needed that because we tilt the pot sideways to fill the reservoir with water (because of the placement on the kitchen counter and the cabinets above), and that plastic handle is not designed for sideways stresses.
You shouldn’t fill the reservoir with the coffee pot, unless you’re really washing the pot super clean after each use. Better get a proper jug for filling the reservoir, so you’re not putting coffee residue and oils back into the clean-water system.
To me, this is begging for a class-action lawsuit.
Yeah, sure, the terms of service probably say that they can do that. That's still in "unconscionable" territory. And courts do not like unconscionable contracts. If it's unconscionable, it's invalid (if I understand the law correctly).
Is this why everybody wants to make appliances with wireless?
Funny thing, that. Go into an electronics store now and pay attention to the TV boxes and the printer boxes. The amount of crazy fine print on both of them now is absurd. The printer boxes all now have lots of fine print about the various ink protection and DRM schemes and subscription services, the TV boxes have everything ranging from binding arbitration on the box (LG) to "(brand) accounts are REQUIRED to use this TV" (Visio).
Customers are gonna get lost in the sauce and skip right past all of that and toss the packaging.
"Is this why everybody wants to make appliances with wireless?"
Which raises in my mind the obvious defense, which is that if you try to put four or five of these devices on your network they'll be too busy interfering with each other for them to actually spy on anything.
Let the wiretaps wiretap the wiretaps. Keeps 'em busy, makes 'em feel like they're doing something important.
> What is my purpose?
You wiretap the wiretaps wiretapping our wiretaps.
> Oh my god.
I don’t dispute the purpose of the data collection, but I can’t believe this quantity of data collection is intentional.
There’s no way Keurig is has the intention of paying the kind of costs required to collect a terabyte of data every two weeks for millions of people who own their coffee makers.
There must be some kind of bug here. I imagine if you unplugged it and plugged it in again the data usage would settle down.
As article says, the coffee machine didn't 'collect' or phone home a TB of data. It just saturated the local network looking for data to collect. This doesn't cost Keurig or any other IoT device company a single cent. It might have been a bug, or maybe not. Without some bad press, like this post; they have no incentive to change anything
I don't understand giving the benefit of the doubt to a company that is actively spying on its customers, which in some jurisdictions would be illegal.
Maybe they literally just don't care about how much traffic they put on your network. Maybe the thought is "1 tb of traffic internally is very low utilization of the network over the course of a month".
Whatever they're trying to accomplish with these scans would probably be impeded in some way by this much volume. Like it'd compete with the link it's using to phone home or overload whatever on-device processing it does with that data. The man in the article who discovered this called it a bug, I agree with him.
I'm not saying there's no malice, it's just that maliciously spamming the network would get in the way of the malicious spying they actually want to do.
When the cost of the action to you is 0, why not do it as fast and as frequently as possible until you get your intended benefit.
Even the act of engineering rate limiting costs you more than just having this run wild over your customers networks because the vast majority of people buying these machines do not have the inclination or skills to detect this activity.
It's impossible to tell the difference between being malicious and being ignorant.
With this particular company, everything else they do is malicious so I won't ever give them the benefit of the doubt.
I tried to use a reusable pod in one of their machines the other day and when I shut it the handle broke off leaving me rather confused. Turns out in the closing head of the machine they stuck in 4 big metal spikes to destroy anything put in there. There is absolutely no reason to do this, none, other than being dicks. Had to get out the epoxy and repair the handle of a friends machine.
Exactly. The whole thing is weird and creepy and wrong.
I understand why a TV would keep track of what I’m watching so they can sell the data. I think it should be illegal. It’s horrible. My TV isn’t connected. But the reason they would do it fits in my brain. I can see how they got there.
How a coffee machine got to running network probes… nothing. It seems like some sort of Internet of Things DEFCON presentation topic made up by putting random words together.
So to think that on top of that they were purposefully causing so much traffic on the local network is just a few steps too far for me to think that part was intentional.
I think the reason to use a coffee machine is because it's an innocent device that doesn't require any data whatsoever, so nobody would ever suspect it of something so nefarious.
They're explicitly taking advantage of their customers' trust, and deserve to go bankrupt.
The reason is that probably the coffee machine vendor doesn't know what is going on. They probably got that module from.some third party, like "hey, you want to cheapen your smart coffee machine? - take out network stack!" and then they don't have to hire developers doing all the work to implement a network configuration system and all that stuff, but have a simple API for the App telling you coffee is ready
The funny part is that the manufactures shitty QA made this a much bigger thing that it could have been. Had the machine done a scan once every week, which is more than enough for their purpose, diffed the result locally and pushed the few kB of data to the internet, then no one would have noticed anything.
Yes, it's malicious and completely unnecessary, but incompetence has potentially made it a PR problem.
I was talking to the guy who used to run our ITSM system at work. He said a team was trying to query the system 10x per second to check for updates, which was causing performance issues. Assuming it was a bug, he went to the team to have them tone it down. He was shocked when they fought with him over it. It was working as designed and they didn't want to check less frequently, despite there being no logical reason to do this.
This may be working exactly as designed, as it costs them effectively nothing to constantly scan.
I mean, it wasn't clear to me without the explanation (I too thought it used 1TB of public internet data), but it's clear now that it is accurate (it literally used 1 TB of private network data)
It might not seem to be anything (people will assume private network traffic is free) but there is a cost - it's capacity that could be used for other purposes, eg. home alarms.
local area network traffic was sent out and received by the device to the tune of 1TB of traffic. not internet data but local area network data which is not ideal for a coffee machine either way you slice it. if it were some kind of local bonjour or whatever the open standard is called service that was just alerting the network of their name it would be understandable but the coffee maker is streaming the equivalent of about 17 high def movies every day to the local network.
Here that meand no lawyers, no discovery, $100 to file in plain language, and a company employee (not a company lawyer, or a contractor, or a temp employee) must attend or they default.
$15k damages.
Reasons it could happen? Imagine grandpa has a tech come out 4 times, because his network is super slow. EG, this think pounding his wifi for its scans.
Grandpa gets his money back. The company? Well, it has to spend money talking to a lawyer, because even though a lawyer can't attend small-claims court, they still consult.
They also have to send an employee to small-claims court, just have to deal with it. In the end it costs the company thousands of dollars maybe even over ten grand. It costs you a hundred bucks and you get your money back. That sort of asymmetry is beautiful, and if everybody availed themselves in small claims court, it would be far better than any class action lawsuit.
Grandpa is definitely not getting $15k in damages, and Keurig can deal with this with their in house lawyer that they're already paying a salary for. They're definitely not shelling out big bucks here. It'd be cheaper for them to let the default judgement happen than to actually show up.
In which case, your grandpa gets his money back, plus filing costs, plus serving costs, and if it's a default judgement, no one to argue against the gas costs, and time costs you tack on.
Please show me how this is suboptimal? Especially with LLMs to write the demand letter, and walk you through the process.
And 'using their in house lawyer' still has time cost, as does dealing with the routing and pondering the service letter. And accounting paying up. There is no aspect of your 'worst case' where it's bad. It's still all pluses. And if as I suggest, lots and lots of people do it, then they end up with a loss on that product.
If each case is $1000, or even $500 payout, how much profit does that take? Profit on 100 units? 50? If a product is horrifically bad, and everyone runs to small claims court, that's disaster for a company.
I'm not saying any of this is bad at all. I'm saying you can't expect the $15k damages you mentioned in your post that I first replied to. It won't cost Keurig anywhere near that even with fees and such. That's why I quoted it specifically in both of my comments.
> If each case is $1000, or even $500 payout
How many people are going to spend $500 on service techs coming out to their house? So far we've got a report from one guy who figured it out with no damages at all, and therefore no case for a small claims court. Since it was found to be defective 10 days after first use, it's probably still eligible to be returned for a refund, so even the cost of the machine isn't eligible.
> If a product is horrifically bad, and everyone runs to small claims court, that's disaster for a company
This much I can agree with for sure. While it is definitely bad, I don't think flooding small claims courts is going to be a viable strategy in this particular case.
I get it now. Looking back at my post, I left out something important. 15K is the maximum damage allowed in small claims court where I live.
For whatever reason I didn't finish that sentence, and just said 15k. Sorry about that.
Where I am, you can get back the cost for sending a registered letter by courier to have it served, signature required. Also for the demand letter. You can get money back for filing, the $100 for example. Lots of little incidentals.
To me, it's when the damages are smallest, that small claims court is the biggest benefit. Losing $30, suddenly becomes a bill of $200, after it goes through small claims court.
But anyhow, I'm just happy if you like small claims court to some degree. I just think we should all use it more.
One thing that confuses me is, well, at this point in the data collection game, is there still value in this 'local' data? I mean, everyone is doing it, collecting the same data - hasn't that decreased the value? Obviously not, but I still wonder.
If there's one thing you can be absolutely certain of it's that every scrap of the data they collect is either making companies money hand over fist or they strongly believe that it will soon. No company is going to bother collecting, storing, (hopefully securing), backing up, and analyzing all this data without a reason, and to them money and power are the only reasons that matter.
Right now companies are somewhat limited in how much use they can get out their horde of private and personal information, but AI is changing that rapidly. As long as you don't mind a huge rate of error (and companies don't because it all becomes "good enough" at a large enough scale) it's basically perfect for the task of digging through endless amounts of information and spewing out bullet points.
Ha. I feel like you have never worked for a large company if you think they are making rational decision at all. They may “believe” this will make them money, but there is no guarantee that this isn’t just costing them money hand over fist.
Honda made millions selling that data. One company only gave them $25,920 for a bunch of it, but why should that matter when it was data they would have collected anyway, can still use themselves, and they're still able to sell it over and over and over again. It doesn't really cost Honda anything to do it so it's basically all profit for them. It tells us how little Honda values our privacy, not the value of that data to them.
Not in my house. What is even the point of connecting a coffee machine or a washing machine to the internet? I think my washing machine advertised that I could download new washing cycle programs in the app. Who on earth cares?
Of course you can set up firewalls and VLANs to have the best of both worlds. You can remotely interact with an IoT device like this to set them off or check the status, but the device itself can't see anything else on the local network.
I have all of my IoT devices on separate Wifi network(s) and VLANs and almost all of them are isolated so they can't talk to each other, plus I occasionally look at how much data they are sending/receiving from the Internet (some is expected obviously, and it differs by device).
Doing this requires a considerable amount of admin work and IT knowledge though. It also requires something a step above most consumer grade or supplier provided networking equipment.
I've never spotted anything egregious like the coffee maker in the OP but if I did I'd be making sure other people knew about it and the device itself is either firewalled off properly or replaced by a brand that isn't a security risk.
> Doing this requires a considerable amount of admin work...
As someone who has done this, it's a one-time cost (as long as you're not the sort who simply can't stop tinkering with it and ends up totally rebuilding it like once a quarter (don't ask me how I know)) and -if you have even just a shaky understanding of how to do it- it's not _that_ large of a cost.
> ...and IT knowledge though.
I definitely agree that doing this requires quite a bit of IT knowledge... but it's all stuff that's pretty easily learnable for anyone who's interested in technical stuff and/or technically-inclined.
For folks who are looking to do this on their home LAN, I have some hardware manufacturer recommendations:
All of this VLAN work will be entirely pointless if your switches can't be programmed to enforce the separation, so one will need "managed" switches of some kind. I'd recommend anyone who wants to try to do this to have a look at Mikrotik switches... they are inexpensive and definitely more than good enough for a fancy home LAN.
Mikrotik also sells routers and WiFi APs. I can't comment on the quality, as I have slapped together my own router PC and use OpenWRT Ones for my APs... but I've found their switches to be more than good enough for my fancy home LAN. Perhaps their routers and AP are equally good?
Mikrotik publishes pretty comprehensive documentation here [0]. If you want to dick around with the Mikrotik management CLI for RouterOS -which is their name for their fancy management software- you can install the x86 version of RouterOS in a VM by booting a VM from one of the x86 install images at [0]. They also have a much simpler management software that you can run on all of their switches called "SwOS" -documented here [2]- but that doesn't have any x86 installation media so you can't play with it on your PC.
> I could see its use - you could remotely activate them
What is the point of activating a washing machine remotely if you aren't there to put your laundry inside? What is the point of activating your coffee machine remotely if you are not here to drink it? Even when you have to fill water in the machine and grind coffee beans, and wait for the machine to preheat the water.it takes less than 3 minutes to prepare an espresso.
That's obviously bad and I hate it, but how much value even is there is the data that a spyware coffee machine could collect about your home? What advertisers would buy such data and what would they advertise to me? What is the marginal value of that data?
Knowing what TV you own, what phone models are used in your house, and what other devices you own tells advertisers about your spending patterns and income.
This does seem to be true in the age of throwing all data in to training the next iteration of the God Machine, but also, some data is a lot more valuable than other data and I want to know what the incentives are of people who are collecting data in our homes and what the actual data / derived data that they're after.
big thing is to be able to serve ads more effectively
so if you know that a user is having an affair, you might want to serve divorce lawyer ads (I'd imagine those are very expensive) or something.
this kind of data though is just like a cog in the machine, but it can e.g. give enough info to know how many people likely are in that household, and so on. useful when combined with other signals
If it scans the network and sees a smart dishwasher, smart washer/drier, and smart lights, but no smart fridge, I imagine its worth something to a company like Samsung to start targeting that customer with ads for a smart fridge.
You can also map a home out depending on signal strength. That gives you approximate size of home which gives you approximate income.
It can also correlate it with geolocation data. Google, for eg, sniffs all broadcasted SSIDs with their StreetView cars. If you can pick up on a SSID (or any of the MAC addresses of the other devices), you can buy the data set that includes it which further pinpoints demographics given the neighborhood AMI.
You can also build behavioral profiles patterns based on things like, for eg, if a baby monitor model is present or a robot vacuum, if certain devices only connect at certain times, etc.
I think the general rule for adtech is that profile guesstimates just need to be around 70%+ fidelity to determine if a sale can be made.
Lastly, you can also just sell the data on the gray market. The more datapoints, the higher the price. Most consumer product companies do that since we have little-to-no data privacy laws and the people who seem the most aware of it also are generally very apathetic and disinterested in advocating for them.
Yeah, it definitely makes sense to me if what adtech is often doing is just backing out from specific data to a general profile like income, location, etc, so that that level of targeting can work.
For example, your aged mother's phone will get pinged within X meters of an urgent-care facility, or she'll do some web-search about "hip pain", and then all the adult children start getting ads to about elderly-parent-care.
Or perhaps the pervy-panopticon decides some phone-on-wifi events look like adultery, and both spouses start getting ads for divorce lawyers. (Bonus if certain specialized "adult" toys are detected on Wifi or Bluetooth...)
yeah, if n=1 then there's no distinguishing it from natural phenomena. regardless of its accuracy, the wanton hoovering up of data is still in full force - that was the whole motivation behind the 'big data' fad (ie when MBAs read a Nate Silver article en masse and believed stats could solve everything)
It’s not so hard to get root shell on some routers via the admin panel, which usually has the same password as the wifi network or a default password. From there the device can capture dns logs.
They can get a profile of when you're in which room, how many people are in the house, etc. That's useful for targeting (e.g., up at 5am, leaves, comes back in an hour or two will have you profiled (more complicated than this since it's usually a fuzzy vector thing, but for the sake of argument) as somebody who goes to the gym, maybe leading to creatine advertising or other whatever), and also for attribution (e.g., a TV ad is shown, somebody gets up, and a purchase is made from a device known to exist at that household, regardless of whether it's behind a VPN).
If you have even very crude data from somewhere else for the targeting, improvements in attribution tech are actually the more important factor. The adtech company mostly doesn't even care who you are, just whether the ad turned into a purchase or not, and that's where a lot of the invasive tracking comes from. They'd be perfectly happy with a quickly changing "identity" if they knew it was reliable and stable between ad and purchase.
That new Amazon page that shows you what it has inferred about you told my friend that he “clips [his] fingernails approximately every two months.” He makes extensive and enthusiastic use of Echo products in his household, but I have no idea how it could've possibly reached that conclusion (and neither does he!).
No one cares. There’s little serious pushback to privacy invasions by big tech. Flock cameras have been a rare exception. Half the people “have nothing to hide” and half aren’t willing to give up the convenience that the popular app or gadget gives them.
I'm convinced this is the state because people don't know the implications and scale of the privacy invasion. The flock camera incident shows that when people can sense, understand and feel the impact they don't like it. If we pose it as they are selling network data, nobody minds, if we pose it as they are selling your identity on the internet people get uncomfortable. But its hard to convince people of the latter. Mostly because nothing big happens due to big data breaches as someone on HN was remarking recently. Additionally, I think people have resigned to the status quo as they think that is the only way they can get their gadgets for cheap. That is just not true, companies can still make a profit without being predatory. Its just that it will not be the maximum profit.
Part of the problem is most people don't have an idea of what's being collected.
With just a little bit of interaction with the modern internet, the profiles created are stunningly accurate. Age, gender, political ideology, favorite food, relationship status, how many kids you have.
All this stuff gets slowly collected, aggregated and shared amongst data brokers.
People would care so much more if they knew just how invasive advertising actually is. All to try and convince you to drink one more coke or grab one more cheeseburger.
You can’t realistically stop this. The industry is international and any interaction being shared across companies allows you to build this profile. It’s impossible to be fully private while having the openness of our internet interactions. You can try to limit the implications but that’s it
I don't truly understand what you are suggesting here. None of these interactions need to be recorded by anyone. You definitely don't need to sell that data.
It cannot be outlawed 100%, no problem can truly be solved by legislation. But that doesn't mean we can't start by banning sale of user data. I don't understand how it is legal to do even today.
You don't need a new toilet seat? But you just looked at toilet seats and then bought one. Are you sure you don't need another? Don't you like toilet seats?
I see this as a failure of news media. Specially tragic as they don't even recognize this as their duty. Their reporting is almost always single data points. They don't make the overall picture clear when reporting this stuff. Imagine if the financial crisis was reported as individual shares crashing and not a market trend.
What are they going to say? "Trackers, like these 300 we have on our site, are monitoring all this stuff and our NDA doesn't let us tell you what they are doing."
330M people in the country, you can run that entirely though a remote FBI office.
and the people using the data are gonna be the local cops; FBI ain't flying out to chase a couple of basic-ass assault charges or thefts.
email snooping, hand full of highway cameras at known bottlenecks, border crossings -- these are abstractions to most people. the flock cameras in their neighborhood are not, and cannot be absractions.
Do you remember how a series of crazy coincidences and freak accidents kept preventing the LHC from being turned on? What if the LHC was causing world-ending or life-ending events, and we simply kept surviving only in thinner and thinner slices of amplitude (timelines) where those freak accidents happened, but where also more improbable world conditions took place?
LHC is a pea shooter compared to the absolute ion cannons that are cosmic rays hitting the upper atmosphere, which are pea shooters compared to acretion disk collisions or particle collisions about a magnetar. Sorry to ruin the fun! :^)
The center of mass of these natural collisions is a huge Lorentz transformation away from Earth's center of mass, which could explain why some unwanted effects are harmless to us. To put a paranoid person at ease you'd need to go a bit further. It's all covered in detail here: https://cds.cern.ch/record/1111112?ln=en
> WTF!! When did we land in the middle of a Black Mirror episode?
At least a decade ago! The first TVs with Automatic Content Recognition shipped in 2013[0]. There was also a brief panic in 2024 about air fryers spying on people[1].
And of course practically every website you visit is doing a full session recording with mouse movements and key presses captured.
Ah the good old days when "we kill people based on metadata"[0] was the conversation and we thought it wouldn't get more invasive. Now we just straight up extract data
...and that was before 2014... over 12 years ago... now people paste into chatbot every content and any content then scan their faces, fingerprints, and documents as a routine.
I’ll keep repeating this but I used to be a technical project manager for “advance analytics” for a major media agency and we used this data in our reporting for ad reach effectiveness.
I worked at a major media buyer agency “big 5” in advanced analytics; we were a team of 5-10 data scientists. We got a firehose on behalf of our client, a major movie studio, of search of their titles by zip code from “G”.
On top of that we had clean roomed audience data from “F” of viewers of the ads/trailers who also viewed ads on their set top boxes. Basically any internet connected device you get is probably doing whatever it can to sniff mac addresses of your network at the least.
From a previous comment of mine:
> … my Insignia TV (best buy store brand) with fire tv built in is basically unusable. Echoing a previous comment I made too, about “smart tvs” and the “streaming sticks”: Hey, have you ever thought of why even the $149 Black Friday loss-leader no-name-brand TVs all have Amazon Fire, Roku, or are now "Smart" in some way? Certainly isn't because they need to incentivise you to connect it to the internet so it acts as a Nielsen-esq measurement device of all media you view on the screen via digital fingerprints that exist in all commercial media and advertisements. [1][2]
A 55" Walmart store brand TV is $200. That's the regular price.
And yes, it's for the reasons those of us who have been in the tech field for a while would guess: it's "smart". It comes preloaded with apps for several streaming services, from which it surely gets a cut. It probably displays ads if allowed to connect to the internet. No doubt it reports what you watch.
I despise the ones that then, after you decline, tell you the app doesn’t work without Bluetooth enabled although the functionality does not need Bluetooth for anything
> And of course practically every website you visit is doing a full session recording with mouse movements and key presses captured.
Well yeah at the very least, that’s Google Analytics and/or similar alternatives.
Most individual websites outside of Google/Facebook/Amazon don’t get any data other than what you do on their website, so it doesn’t seem quite as creepy to me as a device on your home network port scanning and sniffing other traffic.
Google and Facebook can and do ‘spy’ a lot, of course, but otherwise the browser does protect you from most trivial spying by random sites. Not that that’s reason to feel any safer; the few people actually spying on what you do everywhere on the web are the ones with the most resources. This is all going to get way weirder with AI logs, I’m guessing.
You can check this claim for yourself by opening NetworkTools in your browser, then moving your mouse and pressing a few keys to see what data is sent to the server.
You can prob just identify some outbound reqs with like ss -tulpn then use those to set up a Wireshark packet filter and wire as needed to automate. Not sure how but I bet you could set up a hook to listen for any such reqs being made and then start the capture
Before that. Around 2005: DVD players that require updating cryptography keys and hence want an internet connection (and consequently can send around data).
And the first store clerks at the time that shout that "all people have agreed on that, period, complaints are non appropriate because society decided".
Seriously? Literally every appliance that demands an internet connection and use of an app does this. That's why the cheapest products on the market are designed to need apps and connectivity, the prices are subsidized by the assumption of ad data to sell. Been like this for years.
We were living in a "simulated" reality, where tech corporations produced amazing things a ran services practically for free asking very little in return, because it was all being funded by "stimulus" money - effectively the country getting into debt and creating money out of thin air. Once we reached the limit of this we had to face the reality of these companies actually having to pay their own way.
> I'm half convinced the first run of the LHC split the timeline and we've landed in the evil one.
Sadly the real answer is much less dramatic: we did this entirely to ourselves, voluntarily, purely out of lazily taking the path of least resistance offered us by companies that don't have our best interests in mind.
Well it's completely voluntary since no sane person would ever need a "smart" coffee machine connected to the internet. So IMHO it's more Idiocracy than Black Mirror
Started sliding down this slope back when the DMCA was introduced and made tinkering with software or firmware protected by any form of encryption incredibly illegal. That's effectively made it so that any hardware you buy isn't really acting in your best interest, but that of their manufacturers.
The EFF, Doctorow, et. al. were warning us that this was going to happen, over and over again for a really long time. Then they were saying it was beginning to happen for a really long time. Well guess what, the thing they were saying was going to happen happened!
when? It started when we accepted a world where companies could shovel T&Cs at us and pretend it means anything. It worsend when we accepted that companies could change those terms at any time.
We really need laws protecting consumers from "data collection for advertising". It should be a default no with a requirement for explicit opt-in /and with no legal way for companies to charge less for the advertising model/. In fact, customers who agree to the advertising model should be able to get profit sharing revenue.
It doesn't sound plausible to me that the main buyers of this information would be advertisers. It sounds more likely that the buyers are black-hat hackers, or intelligence agencies. The main reason someone would want a map of all of the devices behind your home router is so they know what to target first for exploitation, if they want access.
There are companies that sell people's home ip address as a VPN/Proxy for anyone who wants to use it for anything. They call it "residential ip's". People use them for web scraping, but probably tons of illegal stuff too. AI companies use them to not get blocked.
I've heard that they put it in IoT devices, free Android apps that people use on their TVs, free phone apps, games, prob lots more.. The companies advertise it like its super safe only legit normal people borrow the internet from these people but then in fine print it'll say its not our responsibility etc.
What I have been wondering is - since they don't seem to care or check what people are using the "residential ip's" for, what happens when someone does a bunch of illegal stuff on some random person's home IP and ends up raided by cops?
I feel like the world is going in these directions.. the excuse is always "well, they clicked Yes on the Terms of Service! They agreed to it!"
That’s where they want to be. Your laptop isn’t interesting. You own two thermostats, an EV charger, two Samsung TVs, an LG, etc etc. The LG is watching Netflix. That’s the good stuff.
I think it's high time for legislatures (US, California, EU, whatever) to make this kind of thing outright illegal. No consent popups. No fine print. Just illegal.
Coffee machine scans network? Nope.
Coffee machine reports things about your network? Nope.
TV does ACR? Nope.
TV reports things it incidentally learns about your listening habits? Nope.
TV transmits any microphone data or things derived from mic data that aren't explicit user commands? Nope.
Companies who collect this data even though it's illegal want to sell it or use it for marketing or transfer it to anyone else? Nope.
Company A provides an SDK to company B that does this kind of thing and company B sells the product? A is liable, civilly and criminally, and B is also civilly liable to the extent that they should have and did not exercise due diligence to prevent it.
Company A, company B, and/or the end user have some contract shifting liability? Nope. The parties that the law said are liable are liable, cannot use the contract to avoid liability, cannot use the contract to recover money they have paid as a result of this liability, and cannot enforce arbitration provisions.
Anyone tries to use a contract that is considered illegal under this law? That party becomes responsible for their opposition's legal fees even if they are ultimately found not liable for some other reason.
Police wants to buy this data? Sure, they're welcome to buy what's legally available, except that they, like everyone else, will have a hard time getting the data because it's illegal for anyone to acquire it or sell it.
It's high time to get this done. We've got this and the recent evidence of LG doing all kinds of worse crap and it really should be possible to get some legislators on board.
My general theory is that the aggregate spent on marketing is largely a function of marketers’ budgets. They’ll spend it in whatever way they think is cost effective, but the amount spent may not vary all that strongly with as the set of available marketing technologies changes.
If marketers cannot pay Google, Meta, etc to show their ads to people whom pervasive surveillance indicates are the appropriate targets, then they will pay companies (probably still Google and Meta and very likely still American companies) to show ads to people selected by other means. Everyone’s retirement account will be just fine.
For that matter, consider who some of the biggest offenders are right now. LG and Samsung are Korean. Sony is Japanese. (But Vizio is American and seems to be owned by Walmart.) Maybe reducing surveillance capitalism will make it harder for some of these foreign companies to extract money from the US.
There’s also the national security aspect. Right now, we expect foreign corporations to extensively spy on us. Sure, a law would not necessarily stop foreign powers from spying on us, but at least if we banned the general practice, then foreign powers who do spy on us might get noticed.
I would be a single-issue voter on this. If anyone running for office is doing this, and can get it done, they are getting my vote. I'm so tired of this kind of thing being normal and accepted. It has eroded the public's trust in pretty much all of corporate America, or has at least had a hand in it.
With all the hacks going on, I can't imagine why any company would even want to collect anything if they have a business model that works without it. I would think selling coffee makers and coffee pods would easily be a business model that works without data harvesting. Companies made whole businesses out of selling coffee makers alone for decades.
Why would a company integrate bullshit SDKs into a coffee maker? Because coffee maker ACR isn’t worth anything and because there are companies that will pay absolutely freaking crazy amounts of money, possibly in excess of the entire sale price of the machine.
How do I exhaustively check for whether devices in my household are doing this? Is it enough that I don't see them on my desktop's list of available networks?
I tend to face the problem of too many choices with products. I'm actually thankful that manufacturers like Keurig are voluntarily taking themselves out of the pool of consideration. It makes my decisions easier. I can only see things getting even easier as time goes on.
I can understand a buggy device flooding the network. What's harder to justify is why a coffee maker needs to know anything about the other devices in your house in the first place
> It does so because, as Keurig notes, it’s collecting data about your household in order to let Keurig sell it to advertisers.
This is either outright false or at least highly misleading. Keurig says they may sell information about your coffee brewing habits to third parties (i.e. your usage of the coffee machine itself), but nowhere does "Keurig note" that they collect other data about your household through network scans and sell that to advertisers.
I'm not even sure which tweet you were referring to that implied that. In any case, there are tons of responses here that are interpreting your quote as saying Keurig admitted they do network scans to acquire info about your household to sell to third parties, and that (the idea that Keurig says they do this) is flat out false.
> It does so because, as Keurig notes, it’s collecting data about your household in order to let Keurig sell it to advertisers.
Off topic, but an odd and dubious upside to AI is that it provides an actually valid reason for this mass data collection. Before AI, as you note it was for advertisers, but what are they actually doing with it?
The promise was that with all this data, advertising would be perfected. I seem to remember fears back in the day that it could end up being a form of mind control, with this perfect understanding of you an advertiser could sell you anything, and you'd willingly consume adverts as entertainment they'd be so perfectly tailored to you. Not something any of us would want I'm sure, but that was the promise for advertisers.
The opposite ended up happening. Nobody wants to use the internet without an ad-blocker, when you're forced to use Youtube or something without an ad-blocker you're counting down the seconds until you can skip it, and the rest of the time you don't even notice they're there, let alone any kind of mind control.
Of course you do get thinly veiled advertisements as entertainment, but none of them use mass data collection, they're really not much different to how tv shows used to get made to sell toys in the 80s.
The reason I bring this up is for the question; what is this mass data collection for? We (really) don't want it, advertisers are either unwilling or unable to use it and it costs a tonne of money and effort.
The obvious, and disappointing, reason is that we all need to pretend it works or the internet as we know it collapses, for better or worse. That plus AI being the new excuse I suppose.
How are they defining "metadata"? 1TB of text in 10 days is........A LOT. Metadata about what exactly? What time you brew your coffee every morning, how many cups you drink per day, whether you like regular coffee or cappuccino? I'm having a hard time understanding how all that can add up to 1TB of data. If it's recording audio or packet sniffing, it becomes a lot easier to understand.
More than likely nmap type scanning across all devices on a segment. I had one customer that saturated our AAAA server with requests because they though sending in data on every even was just dandy. For one device in a test lap it was ok. For 10k+ of the things out in restuant across the country was a DDOS. That was all text. it was gigs of data per hour. We sat them down and showed them how to do bundling and better data management.
It is a question many devs miss. what happens when I put this in the wild and I now have hundreds of them.
In this case it is probably scanning aggressively. Just incase you plugged in a new devices in the past 100ms. Then some sort of filter with data compression (hopefully) and then sending its exfiltrated data back home. Honestly, not a cool thing to do and makes your customers NOT trust you. I had an old LG TV that was doing this 15 years ago where it would send every button press back to LG. I unplugged it. It agressivly scan its empty socket.
> 2. It does so because, as Keurig notes, it’s collecting data about your household in order to let Keurig sell it to advertisers
Where is this shown? I see it repeated all through the HN comments but I don't see it in the X thread.
The person who discovered this says he didn't even open Wireshark and capture a few packets, which would have immediately revealed something about the situation.
Reminds me when couple years ago I plugged the TV to the internet (so my relatives kids can watch YT) and I forgot to unplug it for almost a week after, only to find the router dns resolved (and blocked) a million queries, all from that one TV!
The GDPR consent form on this blog did not have a “Reject all” button. It required me to manually reject 16 instances of “legitimate interest,” then scroll through 1,746 vendors to make sure they were all set to reject.
Seems worth mentioning in a post about excessive and intrusive collection of user data. The moral outrage rings hollow when opting out of tracking is so deliberately onerous.
A year or two ago, I was using NextDNS in ad-blocking and logging mode, which very helpfully exposed malware sitting on my very router, which had been completely undetectable, except for the veritable flood of bizarre DNS queries it was routinely sending to the self-configured DNS servers.
Now that I have a new router and I've re-enabled NextDNS, I've ironically discovered that the chief abuser of DNS right now is the router's own legit security software, which is absolutely hammering on the same query, several times a second.
Of course, since I am currently on NextDNS free tier, this matters a lot, because they cut you off after about 300,000 queries in a month. So any hammering abuse will make me lose my privileges much earlier than I would otherwise. So, to stop the abuse, should I shut off my legit security software? It is absolutely rubbish at identifying malware on the device itself...
I love IoT. It's the greedy corporations I hate. Everyone who implements this kinda abusive stuff, from the CEO down to the people building and installing the firmware, are scum.
Yeah, but the people running the Webcam probably didn't make notes about the watch / rings / shirt / dress / shoes worn by the people using the coffee maker, nor take down whether they were wearing glasses and if they added milk - and sell this information to the local jewelers, clothes shop, shoe shop, opticians and dairy.
LineageOS helps, like installing an adblocker helps, but there's no hope for cell phones. Your wireless provider is still tracking you and nobody knows what the blackbox wireless chipsets are doing, including your OS. Framework is a pretty good laptop (it's a candidate for my next even) if you can afford the premium. My next TV and car will be my biggest worry.
Technology could be so much more useful and fun if we just fully banned the collection and sale of personal data. We've been dreaming of smart homes for, like, 80 years, but advertising ruined it just like it ruins everything. Imagine how cool it would be to able to connect devices to the internet for purely functional purposes without them spying on you!
I have a firewall that tells me how much data each device is uploading and downloading. One particular device pulled down 6GB a week and uploaded 1.5GB doing absolutely nothing. I mean literally nothing, I use the local API to communicate with it. Blocking the one domain it was doing this to dropped traffic to essentially zero with no loss in functionality.
> Coffee machines don't need internet. Your thermostat doesn't either.
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Yours may not, but that's just your personal preference. A lot of folks enjoy these products. An argument could be made that no one needs a coffee machine or thermostat to begin with.
You're about 35 years behind the times about people networking their coffee machines [0]. People might want to know the status of the pot (the OG example), how their ground/bean coffee supply is, or the ability to trigger a coffee or water boiling before they walk to the machine. My coffee making process is entirely manual, and I like it that way, but I can at least see how there are some features that could be nice.
I agree on the coffee machine. On the thermostat, not so much. We keep pretty irregular hours so being able to control the thermostat remotely, so the house isn’t being heated unnecessarily but is warm on our return, is useful.
That said, getting a Zigbee or Z-Wave thermostat and have Home Assistant or similar control it is a better option that buying a surveillance-ready WiFi-enabled one.
It's smart and supports only Z-Wave, not WiFi. So something like a machine running Home Assistant must sit between it and the Internet. And then its up to you to decide how you want to do remote access, but WireGuard overlay networks (e.g. Netbird, Tailscale) basically solve that problem at home-user scale.
This. We should buy Z-Wave or Zigbee as much as possible (Matter over WiFi/Thread can access the internet, so are out) to grow that market. Both are completely disconnected from the internet and you decide how such devices can be accessed.
Reject all the WiFi-connected stuff, unless it's very user-centered and worst case you can upload your own firmware (e.g. a bunch of Shelly devices).
Takes some getting used to: Only fill to the escape valve (3/4 of the way up, you can see it from the inside), fill with boiling water from the kettle, put it on a low heat, turn off the heat as soon as it starts to gurgle.
It's not enough to simply have a IoT VLAN that you put all your IoT devices on. Because those devices can see one another. In this case, if the coffee machine can see what type of smart fridge and smart toaster you're using, they can sell that data.
I default to adding IoT devices to a 2.4g "Guest" network where they can't see each other. Exceptions are IoT devices that need to see their friends to do what I bought them for, or devices I want to integrate with HomeAssistant. In those cases I create a separate IoT device per IoT brand. Excessive but necessary.
In those cases I create a separate IoT device per IoT brand.
That requires a lot of SSIDs though and AFAIK it reduces airtime for each SSID on the same router (which may be bad if you also use 2.4GHz for your regular devices).
So far two separate VLAN + SSID (IoT-Good and IoT-Bad) with client isolation on IoT-Bad has worked pretty well for me. In some cases mDNS advertisements have to travel at least from the IoT VLAN to the VLAN HA is on for the devices to be discovered.
There's ways to reduce the expense like changing DTIM interval (for less-frequent broadcasts) and increasing base data rate. Few folks in 2026 have anything at home that requires the 1Mbps base rate of 1999's 802.11b anyway, and slower DTIM can have other advantages, so these tend to work well at increasing available airtime for more SSIDs.
There's an additional trick that can also be used, though: Wifi client isolation. This lets the IoT widgets share an SSID and VLAN with which to talk to the HA machine and/or their cloud-based mothership(s) or whatever, but without being able to see eachother on the SSID.
It still needs set up right left stuff walk right by it, but it's an available feature.
A smart coffee machine may need to talk to some kind of controlling endpoint (whether local or afar) in order to do whatever it does. But it does not need to be able to enjoin in a conversation with my light bulb in order to get there.
There's an additional trick that can also be used, though: Wifi client isolation. This lets the IoT widgets share an SSID and VLAN with which to talk to the HA machine and/or their cloud-based mothership(s) or whatever, but without being able to see eachother on the SSID.
Indeed, this is what I do on our home network. I have two IoT SSIDs. One with devices I generally trust, where mDNS proxying is enabled and another that is excluded. I've found that the worst devices are generally not locally controllable anyway and always want to go through the cloud, even when you control them through HA or your phone.
I hope to be able to find the time and motivation to re-do the wifi stuff at home this weekend. I'll try to adopt the good-and-bad model of having two IoT SSIDs.
Last year I had a big dispute with my ISP that was refusing to support or provide proper WiFi on their router, even while they touted a trademarked brand-name to do it. I ended up turning their router into Bridge Mode and purchasing a real router that could do WiFi. I did this extremely reluctantly, because every other personally-owned router had contracted malware.
After installing the new router (Netgear) my HP LaserJet began printing error pages. Like, I had done nothing to send anything to it, but a blank error page or three would pop out of it at very random times.
It took awhile to narrow down and diagnose this. But it turned out that the Netgear system had a very... proactive network malware detection system. It was red-team scanning my LAN for "vulnerabilities" or exploits or the presence of malware (I think just known vulns). It was a known side-effect of these scans, where it would tickle an RTSP TCP port of some kind and the HP printer would respond with its error printout.
I was so livid that the router was scanning the LAN, basically unbidden and completely undocumented. Even worse, they were not sharing the logs or results of that scan with the consumer. No, they were being sent back to the Netgear mothership, and their cybersecurity vendor overlords. So the scans were not designed to benefit me; they were simply designed to spy on everyone from a privileged vantage point. Now I ask you, why is a piece of kit that is supposed to be "yours" compiling secrets about your network, hiding them from you, and turning them over to, I guess a big database for hackers to leak in due time?
Thankfully I found a way to disable this. Their "security" shitware is still spamming DNS and I may be forced to disable that as well. Meanwhile, routers 100% cannot self-introspect or self-diagnose and find their own malware. I've said it once; I'll say it again: consumer routers are the Achilles Heel to your network. They are ideal points of compromise for any actor to gain a foothold and pivot, or simply gain persistence undetected. Your ISP doesn't care, and your vendors don't care. Perhaps you should.
Wow that seems bonkers to me. Basically scanning and cataloging known vulnerabilities on the sly, and when anyone notices they pretend it is for your benefit somehow.
It would be like finding out ring cameras are taking pictures of your keys and calculating the pin set to producing duplicates and sending that pin set data off somewhere and when caught them being like "Uh, we are uhhh... doing it to make sure your key isn't too worn down or to detect if someone made a crude hand filed key. Yeah that's it!"
One of the routers I had in the distant past, which I flashed with some kind of OpenWRT, was clearly pwned. I do not know if the firmware I downloaded was pre-compromised, or if some entity pwned it as soon as the Internet was accessible. But I would not trust OpenWRT or Tomato or whatever with that track record. I do not need or want such complexity. I want an appliance router that works and will not cause me headaches. In fact, I purchased and evaluated a "gamer router", I believe it was from ASUS, that was extraordinarily complex, and had amazing bells-and-whistles, but ultimately it was not appropriate for home use. That headache-free, simplistic appliance was supposed to belong to my ISP, but they consistently refuse to provide one to me that is fit for purpose.
Considering the computing power of these kinds of devices, it is most likely stuck inside an infinite loop sending garbage at full speed, there is not enough power to process that much volume in any maliciously useful way.
> Never assume malicious intent when incompetence.
I like Hanlon's Razor, but I think sometimes people will use it to fully dismiss the idea of someone being evil because they're stupid, when in reality plenty of people are capable of being both.
Hanlon's Razor is good when your friend breaks your favorite coffee mug. It has never been appropriate for dealing with corporatios or similar anonymous and inherently psychopathic entities.
Holy moly - 1,747 “partners” to share my data with. I mean, how can you even find 1747 data brokers? Where do you get that list. What does the JavaScript look like - I mean … this is getting ridiculous.
But at least the EU did me a solid. I really wanted to read that but I think 2000 data scumbags is not worth the effort.
All I need know is to realise bottlecaps must be recycled and federalism is good. Repeat in the mirror each morning
Haha, never looked at it that way, you could indeed read it as "This website puts a value on your privacy" (And subsequently we can't ignore the enormous value, so we're selling it, indeed)
It collects the data about your home appliances and personal devices. This data can tell a lot about your income level and spending habits. This is extremely useful for advertisers for obvious reasons.
I have a very old school manual espresso machine (a La Pavoni). It's connected to a "smart" plug, which lets me turn on the machine remotely, and have it turn on automatically in the morning. It's nice to have it heated up and ready to go when I wake up. Nothing about the machine is smart though.
I have an admittedly very specific set of constraints that led to me buying a wifi kettle. I:
- have a short window to get to the train in the morning
- want coffee on the train
- don't particularly like drip machine coffee
- want the water boiling when I wake up so that I can make coffee and get out of the house as quickly as possible
- am more morally opposed to waking up five minutes earlier (pushing my wake time into the 4 o'clock hour) than I am to having a smart device.
I couldn't find a kettle that runs on a timer, and just taping the switch in the "on" position and hooking it up to a plug timer felt unsafe, so getting a stupid wifi kettle and using their stupid app to set it to auto-start was the best option. It's on its own network, though.
so you brush when you wake up right? The brushing takes about five minutes. The kettle probably takes less time than that. Probably two minutes in my experience. Why not just wake up fill up water click it on and then brush. I mean, you could even keep the water filled up the previous night.
I don’t disagree that over-automation is a thing. I miss my more leisurely mornings!
I use a Hario Switch to make coffee. It takes 3:30 to brew, so I pour the water and then brush my teeth and prep while waiting. Async coffee! I’m out the door as soon as the coffee is in the mug and get to the train station about 2 minutes before the train arrives.
I’ve accounted for this by planning an alternate route to the station, having a secondary station available and, for cases where those are also blocked, mounting an M2A1 50-caliber machine gun to the roof of my Toyota Corolla.
I have a smart plug that can turn on and off...I have my coffee maker switched on, and it only switches on when my wifi plug is on. So I can have the water heating before I come down stairs. Whether it's better than a smart coffee maker or not I'm not sure - but at least I have a popular device that has more eye. Not sure how many people are looking at niche coffee makers.
My understanding, and I would love for someone to explain why, is that they measure current with a shunt resistor which is fine for inductive loads like a water heater, but not fine for a big motor for example.
These aren't constraints. These are preferences. Framing them like constraints makes it sound like the whole situation is out of your hands, and therefore owning a smart device is practically thrust upon you by external forces.
Just say it: you bought a smart kettle due to your completely adjustable preferences.
We are constrained by the decisions we have made based on the preferences that we maintain.
Thus-constrained, this person states that they're able to get 5 more minutes of sleep every night and still make coffee before taking the train to work. That's ~25 minutes per week, or ~1.8 hours per month.
They didn't have to choose to go to bed earlier in order to gain this time and still make coffee in the morning. They were going to make coffee with a kettle anyway and were constrained by a the necessity of maintainining ownership of a kettle with which to do that.
So they simply selected a kettle that can be safely automated so as to be ready at the right time every morning instead of one that cannot be. In exchange, they gain around 20 hours per year, for every year that this kettle lasts for. (What would you do for nearly an entire extra day, per year?)
Sure: It's adjustable, just as many constraints are.
Maybe there's even a coffee shop around the corner that they could work at instead, and they could just walk there and brew themselves a cup of coffee using the hot tap on the espresso machine before they start their shift.
But maybe that wouldn't fit into the constraint of being able to support they dwelling that they prefer to live in.
So maybe they could soften that constraint as well, and live a little lower. (Maybe they can soften enough constraints that they can just live under a bridge somewhere, with no permanent dwelling, no job, and no coffee. Perhaps, if we look hard enough, we might find that even the constraint of living a life at all adjustable.)
GP might realize sooner or later that they need larger security margins, for when unexpected things happen; like really having to go to the toilets, spilling the coffee they just made, etc.
They can shift their daily schedule e.g. 30 minutes earlier and peacefully drink their coffee at home. They also should eat something at home or on their way, because hurrying in a cold morning with an empty stomach is not good. Source: personal experience. I did that for months as a student until I passed out one day in class.
If they don't like waiting for the train in the cold, they probably can find a warm place near the station, and wait there a little.
Yes, having coffee on the train is a preference, which is why I used the word "want". I suppose that having this job, or any job, is technically a preference. I decided to buy a smart kettle to satisfy my preferences given the constraints they impose. The parent asked why someone would buy a smart coffee device, and I thought it would be fun to give my answer for why, despite my general skepticism of smart devices, I bought one.
Boiling water in a kettle takes like 1 minute, in any cases less than two minutes. And other things can be done during this time. There's no real timing constraints that requires a wifi enabled kettle. You may prefer it this way, and that may be what matters the most here, but it's not really a constraint.
Sure, 120V is slower than 240V, but it's still pretty quick. If I'm boiling a full ass kettle for an iced tea pitcher it might take me 5 minutes. Only enough for a cup of tea is maybe 2 minutes.
These sorts of products aren't typically driven by consumer wants. Rather they're typically driven by B2B/sales/marketing/investor types, who are primarily focused on finding/addressing secondary markets for further profits, more so than it is about addressing core consumer wants.
In other words, these product decisions aren't really made on the rationale that internet connected coffee makers make sense from the standpoint of a consumer who simply wants coffee made...
It's more: "let's make smart coffee makers so that we can sell to 2 markets:
1) a coffee maker to consumers who want coffee made
2) consumers data/eyeballs to advertisers who want their info/eyes
So, separate VLANs, wifi isolation and complete internet blocking for all devices such as this, and only purchase devices that can be controlled via Home Assistant.
None, without people like us in their families who are able and willing to help.
We as computer people need to internalize and accept the idea that helping our immediate and even extended family with technology is now part of defending human freedom. And we need to form ourselves into the best helpers we can be by learning how to teach and communicate well.
> None, without people like us in their families who are able and willing to help.
I am able and willing to help my parents get off of a lot of the spyware bullshit they have throughout their house, but they don't want to hear it. They liked the connected stuff and I think that they think I'm a little weird when I push back about why we can't trust corporations like Google or Microsoft to do everything.
Getting better at communicating is unfortunately really hard. And it must pair with the helper aspect: you've got to also provide value.
"Nomad," the guy from the article, was already administering his parents' home LAN.
How do you get there? "Mom and Dad, we're going to set up your home network so that it's blended with my home network. To all the machines in your house and mine, it'll look like they're on the same network together. That'll make it easier for me to help you with any tech problems you're having, on your computer or on any smart device. The connection between our houses will be encrypted and secure" You're installing a router/firewall for them and adding to your WireGuard overlay network, but you're not using any of those words to tell them what's going on.
What to do next? "How was watching TV last night from {$TIMESTAMP_A} to {$TIMESTAMP_B}? Yeah, my network sentinel detected that your TV was sending your viewing habits out to somewhere on the Internet and warned me and blocked it. I can't tell what you were watching, but {$TV_BRAND} sure can." You're monitoring their LAN via the router/firewall you've set up, but you are again not using technical language.
Wherever spying is invisible and frictionless, make it loud and incessant. And continue to provide value to the family on the shared overlay network. Photo and home video backups, media server (it's like Netflix!), mutual offsite buddy backups, password management, a local Minecraft server for the kids and the cousins.
Build a network garden that is good enough to consider leaving the leviathans behind and build walls around it that are high enough to commit to leaving the leviathans behind.
"They like their connected stuff" means their barrier isn't "I don't want a corporation processing my data", it's "I want to be in charge of my interactions with it". That changes what sort of recommendations you can bring to them. An all-or-nothing mindset is rarely the correct way to change someone's mind.
Recommending they turn off ACR and other spyware on their TV is based on recent reporting is good and backed up by said reporting. Probably even recommending against too-good-to-be-true connected doorbells even.
Meanwhile, telling them not to use a first-party Google, Amazon, or Apple smart home speakers is a bit questionable when there's been pretty good audits over the years that show they really do only do wake word detection. You'll just sound like a crazy person if you can't point to some reporting on a device doing bad.
Yeah, I have some relatives that wanted me to turn off the ad blocking because it meant they couldn't watch ads on their mobile games in order to earn more lives / game time.
I like my connected stuff, too, and I'm not a normie.
I don't need voice-activated lights for the basement for when I head down with my arms full of laundry, or with a bunch of food to put into the freezer, or whatever shit I'm carrying. I don't need them to turn themselves back off after a time, either.
I mean: I could use any of a wide array of motion sensors, but they'll turn the lights on even when I'm just working in the kitchen near the basement stairs. (Or maybe I could use a beam curtain! Yeah! Now they only respond when a beam breaks, instead of when I'm working in the kitchen near the basement stairs!)
Or I could just put the shit down and flip the switch.
Or: Plan ahead, and flip the switch in advance. And then just flip it back off when I'm done down there.
But I chose this path anyway, and I like it this way. I invited the spies into my home very deliberately. (I also chose to carry an always-on pocket supercomputer with me wherever I go, and I have no way to observe what that thing is really doing at any given time.)
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[ 0.19 ms ] story [ 112 ms ] threadI didn't even know it had wifi capability but it was trying to connect
I use mac whitelist so it wasn't even getting in but that didn't stop it from trying every seond
Fortunately it was just a usb dongle so yanked it out
It's great having them on WiFi - you can turn on the AC before getting home to pre-cool, without having to leave it on all day.
Man: Well, before you couldn't turn on the AC before you got home
I know this sounds like the famous "just do it this way in linux instead" criticism of Dropbox back in the day. But I do think we reached "life parodies fiction" with these smart devices where it makes sense to give diy another go. And with AI, there's less excuses this time around I would imagine.
But I would literally rather by a cheap phone, a cheap SIM, hotspot it and connect it to a charger and have the AC connect to that and isolate it that way instead of letting it touch the network.
And I wonder how I would even tell if it was trying to associate with my WiFi.
https://xkcd.com/3109/
Legislators are cheap to purchase
Why not? iirc some of the smart TVs have been shown to find open wifi networks on their own and upload data. (I'm not sure about that though. But it's plausible and undoubtedly will be implemented some day).
I could also see some kind of partnership with ISPs to use their "public" WiFi hotspots[1]. This seems more likely since it's (probably) harder to honeypot but requires making regional deals.
[1] https://www.highspeedinternet.com/resources/is-your-router-a...
Why you would give a coffee maker access to your WiFi is the real question,
Besides, did you see how he was dressed?
Since most appliances now contain a general-purpose computer, it would be unfair to say that a device is incapable of hacking or hosting malware, because any device with the given sensors and radios and capabilities can be essentially reprogrammed at any time.
So, if we're looking at smart TVs with microphones and Wi-Fi and Bluetooth and all the connectors, or if we're simply looking at a an ordinary network device, they all fall under the umbrella of general purpose computer, and there is no way to trust their maker, or some equally capable programmer, not to turn them malevolent in some future update.
I don't view this as an issue of terms of service or of software or of your manufacturer. I view this as an existential and fundamental problem with dropping general purpose computers into your home and behind your DMZ.
Consumer operating systems like Windows and Apple have all kinds of countermeasures against this malicious use. But without the proper introspection and without the proper safeguards, a device that looks special purpose but is in fact general purpose is far more dangerous.
I don’t actually think that applies to coffee makers spying on people though. People shouldn’t be expected to understand how computer networks or ad tech spying works in the same way that literally any child or idiot should know the difference between a lion cub and a house cat.
How do you feel about thermostats? Are some things worth it? I've had a "smart" one for the past five years, part of a new furnace install, that I've stubbornly refused to connect to my wifi. Of course this means if we forget to turn the heat down while no one's home, there's nothing to be done about it.
So?
That, plus nobody in their right mind would buy American (vs French, Italian, German, Dutch...) when it comes to coffee. (yes, Starbucks is a thing here, but I'd argue people who are into _coffee_ don't go there, people go there for other reasons.)
The device is dead simple. No advanced electronics. Nothing complex that can break. Just a coffee maker fine-tuned to near perfection.
The only flaw it has is the handle for the pot. I've resorted to replacing the plastic handle with a fancy walnut one I made myself. I needed that because we tilt the pot sideways to fill the reservoir with water (because of the placement on the kitchen counter and the cabinets above), and that plastic handle is not designed for sideways stresses.
Like the people who reply to nigerian emails have already been pre-qualified by 1) ignoring the misspellings and 2) replying.
Limiting the quantity of data which is transmitted, received or sent, an appliance that a person purchases.
Yeah, sure, the terms of service probably say that they can do that. That's still in "unconscionable" territory. And courts do not like unconscionable contracts. If it's unconscionable, it's invalid (if I understand the law correctly).
Is this why everybody wants to make appliances with wireless?
Customers are gonna get lost in the sauce and skip right past all of that and toss the packaging.
Which raises in my mind the obvious defense, which is that if you try to put four or five of these devices on your network they'll be too busy interfering with each other for them to actually spy on anything.
Let the wiretaps wiretap the wiretaps. Keeps 'em busy, makes 'em feel like they're doing something important.
its LGs glass in LG household, and now Keurigs kitchen
There’s no way Keurig is has the intention of paying the kind of costs required to collect a terabyte of data every two weeks for millions of people who own their coffee makers.
There must be some kind of bug here. I imagine if you unplugged it and plugged it in again the data usage would settle down.
But still must be a bug.
What kind of processor does this thing have ?
Still seems buggy.
The traffic volume just sounds like a bug to me.
Closed source software/hardware is a data exfiltration device first, and the thing they're sold for secondarily.
TVs, Blurays, set top boxes, MS Windows.. All of them are the same.
Even the act of engineering rate limiting costs you more than just having this run wild over your customers networks because the vast majority of people buying these machines do not have the inclination or skills to detect this activity.
With this particular company, everything else they do is malicious so I won't ever give them the benefit of the doubt.
I tried to use a reusable pod in one of their machines the other day and when I shut it the handle broke off leaving me rather confused. Turns out in the closing head of the machine they stuck in 4 big metal spikes to destroy anything put in there. There is absolutely no reason to do this, none, other than being dicks. Had to get out the epoxy and repair the handle of a friends machine.
So yea, screw them.
The frequency etc. leading to 1TB is probably ignorance, but that doesn't matter as it is consequence of malicious scanning either way.
I understand why a TV would keep track of what I’m watching so they can sell the data. I think it should be illegal. It’s horrible. My TV isn’t connected. But the reason they would do it fits in my brain. I can see how they got there.
How a coffee machine got to running network probes… nothing. It seems like some sort of Internet of Things DEFCON presentation topic made up by putting random words together.
So to think that on top of that they were purposefully causing so much traffic on the local network is just a few steps too far for me to think that part was intentional.
They're explicitly taking advantage of their customers' trust, and deserve to go bankrupt.
Yes, it's malicious and completely unnecessary, but incompetence has potentially made it a PR problem.
This may be working exactly as designed, as it costs them effectively nothing to constantly scan.
We had a similar thing, the other team wouldn't back down.
We ended up implementing a kind of rate limiting internally.
If the previous request (from that IP) was more than 4.5 seconds ago we let the check request through as normal.
If the previous request (from that IP) was more recent than that we just returned a cached "there is no update" payload that had a TTL of 60 seconds.
We told them this and left it up to them, they soon changed their polling frequency.
It might not seem to be anything (people will assume private network traffic is free) but there is a cost - it's capacity that could be used for other purposes, eg. home alarms.
Here that meand no lawyers, no discovery, $100 to file in plain language, and a company employee (not a company lawyer, or a contractor, or a temp employee) must attend or they default.
$15k damages.
Reasons it could happen? Imagine grandpa has a tech come out 4 times, because his network is super slow. EG, this think pounding his wifi for its scans.
Grandpa gets reimbursed for the four techs who came out, that's it.
Grandpa gets his money back. The company? Well, it has to spend money talking to a lawyer, because even though a lawyer can't attend small-claims court, they still consult.
They also have to send an employee to small-claims court, just have to deal with it. In the end it costs the company thousands of dollars maybe even over ten grand. It costs you a hundred bucks and you get your money back. That sort of asymmetry is beautiful, and if everybody availed themselves in small claims court, it would be far better than any class action lawsuit.
Grandpa is definitely not getting $15k in damages, and Keurig can deal with this with their in house lawyer that they're already paying a salary for. They're definitely not shelling out big bucks here. It'd be cheaper for them to let the default judgement happen than to actually show up.
Let everyone file that claim for a single geek squad visit.
Please show me how this is suboptimal? Especially with LLMs to write the demand letter, and walk you through the process.
And 'using their in house lawyer' still has time cost, as does dealing with the routing and pondering the service letter. And accounting paying up. There is no aspect of your 'worst case' where it's bad. It's still all pluses. And if as I suggest, lots and lots of people do it, then they end up with a loss on that product.
If each case is $1000, or even $500 payout, how much profit does that take? Profit on 100 units? 50? If a product is horrifically bad, and everyone runs to small claims court, that's disaster for a company.
> If each case is $1000, or even $500 payout
How many people are going to spend $500 on service techs coming out to their house? So far we've got a report from one guy who figured it out with no damages at all, and therefore no case for a small claims court. Since it was found to be defective 10 days after first use, it's probably still eligible to be returned for a refund, so even the cost of the machine isn't eligible.
> If a product is horrifically bad, and everyone runs to small claims court, that's disaster for a company
This much I can agree with for sure. While it is definitely bad, I don't think flooding small claims courts is going to be a viable strategy in this particular case.
For whatever reason I didn't finish that sentence, and just said 15k. Sorry about that.
Where I am, you can get back the cost for sending a registered letter by courier to have it served, signature required. Also for the demand letter. You can get money back for filing, the $100 for example. Lots of little incidentals.
To me, it's when the damages are smallest, that small claims court is the biggest benefit. Losing $30, suddenly becomes a bill of $200, after it goes through small claims court.
But anyhow, I'm just happy if you like small claims court to some degree. I just think we should all use it more.
Right now companies are somewhat limited in how much use they can get out their horde of private and personal information, but AI is changing that rapidly. As long as you don't mind a huge rate of error (and companies don't because it all becomes "good enough" at a large enough scale) it's basically perfect for the task of digging through endless amounts of information and spewing out bullet points.
Not in my house. What is even the point of connecting a coffee machine or a washing machine to the internet? I think my washing machine advertised that I could download new washing cycle programs in the app. Who on earth cares?
None of these are worth the spying that these companies do though.
I have all of my IoT devices on separate Wifi network(s) and VLANs and almost all of them are isolated so they can't talk to each other, plus I occasionally look at how much data they are sending/receiving from the Internet (some is expected obviously, and it differs by device).
Doing this requires a considerable amount of admin work and IT knowledge though. It also requires something a step above most consumer grade or supplier provided networking equipment.
I've never spotted anything egregious like the coffee maker in the OP but if I did I'd be making sure other people knew about it and the device itself is either firewalled off properly or replaced by a brand that isn't a security risk.
As someone who has done this, it's a one-time cost (as long as you're not the sort who simply can't stop tinkering with it and ends up totally rebuilding it like once a quarter (don't ask me how I know)) and -if you have even just a shaky understanding of how to do it- it's not _that_ large of a cost.
> ...and IT knowledge though.
I definitely agree that doing this requires quite a bit of IT knowledge... but it's all stuff that's pretty easily learnable for anyone who's interested in technical stuff and/or technically-inclined.
For folks who are looking to do this on their home LAN, I have some hardware manufacturer recommendations:
All of this VLAN work will be entirely pointless if your switches can't be programmed to enforce the separation, so one will need "managed" switches of some kind. I'd recommend anyone who wants to try to do this to have a look at Mikrotik switches... they are inexpensive and definitely more than good enough for a fancy home LAN.
Mikrotik also sells routers and WiFi APs. I can't comment on the quality, as I have slapped together my own router PC and use OpenWRT Ones for my APs... but I've found their switches to be more than good enough for my fancy home LAN. Perhaps their routers and AP are equally good?
Mikrotik publishes pretty comprehensive documentation here [0]. If you want to dick around with the Mikrotik management CLI for RouterOS -which is their name for their fancy management software- you can install the x86 version of RouterOS in a VM by booting a VM from one of the x86 install images at [0]. They also have a much simpler management software that you can run on all of their switches called "SwOS" -documented here [2]- but that doesn't have any x86 installation media so you can't play with it on your PC.
[0] <https://manual.mikrotik.com/docs/introduction>
[1] <https://mikrotik.com/download?architecture=x86>
[2] <https://manual.mikrotik.com/docs/bridging-and-switching/swos...>
What is the point of activating a washing machine remotely if you aren't there to put your laundry inside? What is the point of activating your coffee machine remotely if you are not here to drink it? Even when you have to fill water in the machine and grind coffee beans, and wait for the machine to preheat the water.it takes less than 3 minutes to prepare an espresso.
Looks like nmap OS detection can use ~90kb per host per attempt.
But why do they need to collect 1 TB? Sounds like a lot of redundant/doublicated entries then for a small network?
so if you know that a user is having an affair, you might want to serve divorce lawyer ads (I'd imagine those are very expensive) or something.
this kind of data though is just like a cog in the machine, but it can e.g. give enough info to know how many people likely are in that household, and so on. useful when combined with other signals
It can also correlate it with geolocation data. Google, for eg, sniffs all broadcasted SSIDs with their StreetView cars. If you can pick up on a SSID (or any of the MAC addresses of the other devices), you can buy the data set that includes it which further pinpoints demographics given the neighborhood AMI.
You can also build behavioral profiles patterns based on things like, for eg, if a baby monitor model is present or a robot vacuum, if certain devices only connect at certain times, etc.
I think the general rule for adtech is that profile guesstimates just need to be around 70%+ fidelity to determine if a sale can be made.
Lastly, you can also just sell the data on the gray market. The more datapoints, the higher the price. Most consumer product companies do that since we have little-to-no data privacy laws and the people who seem the most aware of it also are generally very apathetic and disinterested in advocating for them.
For example, your aged mother's phone will get pinged within X meters of an urgent-care facility, or she'll do some web-search about "hip pain", and then all the adult children start getting ads to about elderly-parent-care.
Or perhaps the pervy-panopticon decides some phone-on-wifi events look like adultery, and both spouses start getting ads for divorce lawyers. (Bonus if certain specialized "adult" toys are detected on Wifi or Bluetooth...)
it's probably even more dystopian now with phone apps vacuuming up every last dreg.
Scale it up - make that millions of homes. Now there is godlike strategic value. Esp when "borrowed" by 3 letter agencies.
If you have even very crude data from somewhere else for the targeting, improvements in attribution tech are actually the more important factor. The adtech company mostly doesn't even care who you are, just whether the ad turned into a purchase or not, and that's where a lot of the invasive tracking comes from. They'd be perfectly happy with a quickly changing "identity" if they knew it was reliable and stable between ad and purchase.
I don't know if it has a microphone, to be clear. Just answering your question
WTF!! When did we land in the middle of a Black Mirror episode?
I'm half convinced the first run of the LHC split the timeline and we've landed in the evil one.
With just a little bit of interaction with the modern internet, the profiles created are stunningly accurate. Age, gender, political ideology, favorite food, relationship status, how many kids you have.
All this stuff gets slowly collected, aggregated and shared amongst data brokers.
People would care so much more if they knew just how invasive advertising actually is. All to try and convince you to drink one more coke or grab one more cheeseburger.
Maybe I should be port scanning it to make sure?
330M people in the country, you can run that entirely though a remote FBI office.
and the people using the data are gonna be the local cops; FBI ain't flying out to chase a couple of basic-ass assault charges or thefts.
email snooping, hand full of highway cameras at known bottlenecks, border crossings -- these are abstractions to most people. the flock cameras in their neighborhood are not, and cannot be absractions.
If people didn't care then why do so many companies have to coerce/deceive users into using their product?
Convenience my ass - the alternative to "convenience" is not participating in modern society, which isn't a decision at all.
Ahem
https://www.gov.uk/data-protection
This depends on the country:
- In Germany, many people are very suspicious about such privacy invasions.
- In Singapore, on the other hand, people seem to very accepting of public surveillance if it serves public safety.
- In China, of course, public surveillance is also huge (at least in the big cities). I don't know how Chinese citizens think about that.
And thanks to surveillance, you never will.
World only survives, in realities where this particular creature in containment is alive. I’ll see if I can dig it up.
> Reactive Action: None taken; event fully consistent with long-term probability models.
heh. love scp humor.
But thanks for an hour-long break from work nevertheless.
SCP Wiki should itself be classified an Euclid-level threat (TV Tropes is obviously Keter class).
https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/lucky-dinosaur
https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/lucky-dinosaur
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_suicide_and_immortalit...
https://reactormag.com/divided-by-infinity/
People can work around patents, or pay for licensing them etc, if they really want to do something.
At least a decade ago! The first TVs with Automatic Content Recognition shipped in 2013[0]. There was also a brief panic in 2024 about air fryers spying on people[1].
And of course practically every website you visit is doing a full session recording with mouse movements and key presses captured.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_content_recognition
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/nov/05/air-fryer...
[0] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tL8_caB35Pg
I worked at a major media buyer agency “big 5” in advanced analytics; we were a team of 5-10 data scientists. We got a firehose on behalf of our client, a major movie studio, of search of their titles by zip code from “G”.
On top of that we had clean roomed audience data from “F” of viewers of the ads/trailers who also viewed ads on their set top boxes. Basically any internet connected device you get is probably doing whatever it can to sniff mac addresses of your network at the least.
From a previous comment of mine:
> … my Insignia TV (best buy store brand) with fire tv built in is basically unusable. Echoing a previous comment I made too, about “smart tvs” and the “streaming sticks”: Hey, have you ever thought of why even the $149 Black Friday loss-leader no-name-brand TVs all have Amazon Fire, Roku, or are now "Smart" in some way? Certainly isn't because they need to incentivise you to connect it to the internet so it acts as a Nielsen-esq measurement device of all media you view on the screen via digital fingerprints that exist in all commercial media and advertisements. [1][2]
[1] https://www.ispot.tv/
[2] https://www.samba.tv/
Doesn't Google basically make this kind of data public? I know I've seen maps by state of what people are searching for, this is barely different.
Point being, it seems absurd to compare this to snooping on people's private networks by third parties
And yes, it's for the reasons those of us who have been in the tech field for a while would guess: it's "smart". It comes preloaded with apps for several streaming services, from which it surely gets a cut. It probably displays ads if allowed to connect to the internet. No doubt it reports what you watch.
Well yeah at the very least, that’s Google Analytics and/or similar alternatives.
Most individual websites outside of Google/Facebook/Amazon don’t get any data other than what you do on their website, so it doesn’t seem quite as creepy to me as a device on your home network port scanning and sniffing other traffic.
Google and Facebook can and do ‘spy’ a lot, of course, but otherwise the browser does protect you from most trivial spying by random sites. Not that that’s reason to feel any safer; the few people actually spying on what you do everywhere on the web are the ones with the most resources. This is all going to get way weirder with AI logs, I’m guessing.
And the first store clerks at the time that shout that "all people have agreed on that, period, complaints are non appropriate because society decided".
April 29, 2016. It explains so much.
Lovey example: https://frescocooks.com/platform/marketing-and-engagement
Air Fryers selling data: https://abc7news.com/post/certain-air-fryers-app-connected-a...
Student in NZ protesting it: https://www.consumer.org.nz/consumer-rights-and-campaigns/da...
Hope your TV isn't connected to the internet: https://www.cnet.com/tech/home-entertainment/tv-spying-yes-h...
The first thing that Meta did after Brexit was moving its UK's user data to the US.
The FUD (never laughter) came from the scummy US ad-tech industry; the people whos very salleries depend on invading our privacy.
You will find many of them posting (and downvoting GDPR posts) here on HN to spread their FUD.
Sadly the real answer is much less dramatic: we did this entirely to ourselves, voluntarily, purely out of lazily taking the path of least resistance offered us by companies that don't have our best interests in mind.
I'd convergence was about 10 years back. Whenever the David Cameron pig story broke.
The majority of people just chose to turn their blind eye towards those developments and dismiss the warnings as conspiracy theories.
"Smart" devices have been pulling this shit for years. If you're surprised by this you weren't paying attention!
The EFF, Doctorow, et. al. were warning us that this was going to happen, over and over again for a really long time. Then they were saying it was beginning to happen for a really long time. Well guess what, the thing they were saying was going to happen happened!
We really need laws protecting consumers from "data collection for advertising". It should be a default no with a requirement for explicit opt-in /and with no legal way for companies to charge less for the advertising model/. In fact, customers who agree to the advertising model should be able to get profit sharing revenue.
I've heard that they put it in IoT devices, free Android apps that people use on their TVs, free phone apps, games, prob lots more.. The companies advertise it like its super safe only legit normal people borrow the internet from these people but then in fine print it'll say its not our responsibility etc.
What I have been wondering is - since they don't seem to care or check what people are using the "residential ip's" for, what happens when someone does a bunch of illegal stuff on some random person's home IP and ends up raided by cops?
I feel like the world is going in these directions.. the excuse is always "well, they clicked Yes on the Terms of Service! They agreed to it!"
This shit needs to be banned, now!
Client isolation would help, but it also breaks some devices.
Are there decent daemons that allow me to allowlist which broadcast traffic to permit?
Ideally it'd be compatible with IPv6-only clients on my LAN.
I feel like we could build a custom reflector/firewall that would make selective isolation possible.
Because the article is also full of 238 advertisers.
Coffee machine scans network? Nope.
Coffee machine reports things about your network? Nope.
TV does ACR? Nope.
TV reports things it incidentally learns about your listening habits? Nope.
TV transmits any microphone data or things derived from mic data that aren't explicit user commands? Nope.
Companies who collect this data even though it's illegal want to sell it or use it for marketing or transfer it to anyone else? Nope.
Company A provides an SDK to company B that does this kind of thing and company B sells the product? A is liable, civilly and criminally, and B is also civilly liable to the extent that they should have and did not exercise due diligence to prevent it.
Company A, company B, and/or the end user have some contract shifting liability? Nope. The parties that the law said are liable are liable, cannot use the contract to avoid liability, cannot use the contract to recover money they have paid as a result of this liability, and cannot enforce arbitration provisions.
Anyone tries to use a contract that is considered illegal under this law? That party becomes responsible for their opposition's legal fees even if they are ultimately found not liable for some other reason.
Police wants to buy this data? Sure, they're welcome to buy what's legally available, except that they, like everyone else, will have a hard time getting the data because it's illegal for anyone to acquire it or sell it.
It's high time to get this done. We've got this and the recent evidence of LG doing all kinds of worse crap and it really should be possible to get some legislators on board.
If marketers cannot pay Google, Meta, etc to show their ads to people whom pervasive surveillance indicates are the appropriate targets, then they will pay companies (probably still Google and Meta and very likely still American companies) to show ads to people selected by other means. Everyone’s retirement account will be just fine.
For that matter, consider who some of the biggest offenders are right now. LG and Samsung are Korean. Sony is Japanese. (But Vizio is American and seems to be owned by Walmart.) Maybe reducing surveillance capitalism will make it harder for some of these foreign companies to extract money from the US.
There’s also the national security aspect. Right now, we expect foreign corporations to extensively spy on us. Sure, a law would not necessarily stop foreign powers from spying on us, but at least if we banned the general practice, then foreign powers who do spy on us might get noticed.
With all the hacks going on, I can't imagine why any company would even want to collect anything if they have a business model that works without it. I would think selling coffee makers and coffee pods would easily be a business model that works without data harvesting. Companies made whole businesses out of selling coffee makers alone for decades.
https://help.earnapp.com/hc/en-us/articles/38191916327441--W...
I think Bright Data is similar but I didn’t find their authoritative numbers. It doesn’t help that my ad blocker blocks their entire domain.
The people that said LG isn’t the only company doing invasive data harvesting is sadly correct.
How did we as a society let it get to this point?
This is either outright false or at least highly misleading. Keurig says they may sell information about your coffee brewing habits to third parties (i.e. your usage of the coffee machine itself), but nowhere does "Keurig note" that they collect other data about your household through network scans and sell that to advertisers.
I'm not even sure which tweet you were referring to that implied that. In any case, there are tons of responses here that are interpreting your quote as saying Keurig admitted they do network scans to acquire info about your household to sell to third parties, and that (the idea that Keurig says they do this) is flat out false.
Off topic, but an odd and dubious upside to AI is that it provides an actually valid reason for this mass data collection. Before AI, as you note it was for advertisers, but what are they actually doing with it?
The promise was that with all this data, advertising would be perfected. I seem to remember fears back in the day that it could end up being a form of mind control, with this perfect understanding of you an advertiser could sell you anything, and you'd willingly consume adverts as entertainment they'd be so perfectly tailored to you. Not something any of us would want I'm sure, but that was the promise for advertisers. The opposite ended up happening. Nobody wants to use the internet without an ad-blocker, when you're forced to use Youtube or something without an ad-blocker you're counting down the seconds until you can skip it, and the rest of the time you don't even notice they're there, let alone any kind of mind control. Of course you do get thinly veiled advertisements as entertainment, but none of them use mass data collection, they're really not much different to how tv shows used to get made to sell toys in the 80s.
The reason I bring this up is for the question; what is this mass data collection for? We (really) don't want it, advertisers are either unwilling or unable to use it and it costs a tonne of money and effort. The obvious, and disappointing, reason is that we all need to pretend it works or the internet as we know it collapses, for better or worse. That plus AI being the new excuse I suppose.
Good lord.
It is a question many devs miss. what happens when I put this in the wild and I now have hundreds of them.
In this case it is probably scanning aggressively. Just incase you plugged in a new devices in the past 100ms. Then some sort of filter with data compression (hopefully) and then sending its exfiltrated data back home. Honestly, not a cool thing to do and makes your customers NOT trust you. I had an old LG TV that was doing this 15 years ago where it would send every button press back to LG. I unplugged it. It agressivly scan its empty socket.
Where is this shown? I see it repeated all through the HN comments but I don't see it in the X thread.
The person who discovered this says he didn't even open Wireshark and capture a few packets, which would have immediately revealed something about the situation.
Seems worth mentioning in a post about excessive and intrusive collection of user data. The moral outrage rings hollow when opting out of tracking is so deliberately onerous.
Now that I have a new router and I've re-enabled NextDNS, I've ironically discovered that the chief abuser of DNS right now is the router's own legit security software, which is absolutely hammering on the same query, several times a second.
Of course, since I am currently on NextDNS free tier, this matters a lot, because they cut you off after about 300,000 queries in a month. So any hammering abuse will make me lose my privileges much earlier than I would otherwise. So, to stop the abuse, should I shut off my legit security software? It is absolutely rubbish at identifying malware on the device itself...
Probably.
FWIW preventing the harm that happened here would seem to require a second set of APs (radios) on a different channel.
Yours may not, but that's just your personal preference. A lot of folks enjoy these products. An argument could be made that no one needs a coffee machine or thermostat to begin with.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trojan_Room_coffee_pot
It's smart and supports only Z-Wave, not WiFi. So something like a machine running Home Assistant must sit between it and the Internet. And then its up to you to decide how you want to do remote access, but WireGuard overlay networks (e.g. Netbird, Tailscale) basically solve that problem at home-user scale.
Reject all the WiFi-connected stuff, unless it's very user-centered and worst case you can upload your own firmware (e.g. a bunch of Shelly devices).
Plenty of houses are not well insulated though...
There's a Bialetti shop on the road between the flat I'm staying in, and the Metro station.
If I'm not careful this is going to seriously damage my wealth.
It is objectively bad since the water is way too hot, but I still like it. And now I'm tempted to make more coffee.
Now I want another too.
I default to adding IoT devices to a 2.4g "Guest" network where they can't see each other. Exceptions are IoT devices that need to see their friends to do what I bought them for, or devices I want to integrate with HomeAssistant. In those cases I create a separate IoT device per IoT brand. Excessive but necessary.
That requires a lot of SSIDs though and AFAIK it reduces airtime for each SSID on the same router (which may be bad if you also use 2.4GHz for your regular devices).
So far two separate VLAN + SSID (IoT-Good and IoT-Bad) with client isolation on IoT-Bad has worked pretty well for me. In some cases mDNS advertisements have to travel at least from the IoT VLAN to the VLAN HA is on for the devices to be discovered.
There's ways to reduce the expense like changing DTIM interval (for less-frequent broadcasts) and increasing base data rate. Few folks in 2026 have anything at home that requires the 1Mbps base rate of 1999's 802.11b anyway, and slower DTIM can have other advantages, so these tend to work well at increasing available airtime for more SSIDs.
There's an additional trick that can also be used, though: Wifi client isolation. This lets the IoT widgets share an SSID and VLAN with which to talk to the HA machine and/or their cloud-based mothership(s) or whatever, but without being able to see eachother on the SSID.
It still needs set up right left stuff walk right by it, but it's an available feature.
A smart coffee machine may need to talk to some kind of controlling endpoint (whether local or afar) in order to do whatever it does. But it does not need to be able to enjoin in a conversation with my light bulb in order to get there.
Indeed, this is what I do on our home network. I have two IoT SSIDs. One with devices I generally trust, where mDNS proxying is enabled and another that is excluded. I've found that the worst devices are generally not locally controllable anyway and always want to go through the cloud, even when you control them through HA or your phone.
I hope to be able to find the time and motivation to re-do the wifi stuff at home this weekend. I'll try to adopt the good-and-bad model of having two IoT SSIDs.
After installing the new router (Netgear) my HP LaserJet began printing error pages. Like, I had done nothing to send anything to it, but a blank error page or three would pop out of it at very random times.
It took awhile to narrow down and diagnose this. But it turned out that the Netgear system had a very... proactive network malware detection system. It was red-team scanning my LAN for "vulnerabilities" or exploits or the presence of malware (I think just known vulns). It was a known side-effect of these scans, where it would tickle an RTSP TCP port of some kind and the HP printer would respond with its error printout.
I was so livid that the router was scanning the LAN, basically unbidden and completely undocumented. Even worse, they were not sharing the logs or results of that scan with the consumer. No, they were being sent back to the Netgear mothership, and their cybersecurity vendor overlords. So the scans were not designed to benefit me; they were simply designed to spy on everyone from a privileged vantage point. Now I ask you, why is a piece of kit that is supposed to be "yours" compiling secrets about your network, hiding them from you, and turning them over to, I guess a big database for hackers to leak in due time?
Thankfully I found a way to disable this. Their "security" shitware is still spamming DNS and I may be forced to disable that as well. Meanwhile, routers 100% cannot self-introspect or self-diagnose and find their own malware. I've said it once; I'll say it again: consumer routers are the Achilles Heel to your network. They are ideal points of compromise for any actor to gain a foothold and pivot, or simply gain persistence undetected. Your ISP doesn't care, and your vendors don't care. Perhaps you should.
It would be like finding out ring cameras are taking pictures of your keys and calculating the pin set to producing duplicates and sending that pin set data off somewhere and when caught them being like "Uh, we are uhhh... doing it to make sure your key isn't too worn down or to detect if someone made a crude hand filed key. Yeah that's it!"
If you don't trust prebuilt binary blob, just build it yourself. At least you have option.
I have multiple devices that queries their update server every 15 seconds, which all shows up as the top 10 queried domain in my network.
Considering the computing power of these kinds of devices, it is most likely stuck inside an infinite loop sending garbage at full speed, there is not enough power to process that much volume in any maliciously useful way.
I like Hanlon's Razor, but I think sometimes people will use it to fully dismiss the idea of someone being evil because they're stupid, when in reality plenty of people are capable of being both.
No, fuck this lazy line of thinking. If the outcome is the same they then it doesn't matter.
But at least the EU did me a solid. I really wanted to read that but I think 2000 data scumbags is not worth the effort.
All I need know is to realise bottlecaps must be recycled and federalism is good. Repeat in the mirror each morning
Advertising is a lottery, they all try to show you an ad knowing very well it will most likely be ignored.
Where do they get the money to buy your details in the first place ?
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2324
Bruh should have set his PiHole to return HTTP 418 in response to any outbound request this thing made.
Then I disabled my ad blocker to see how much data comes down. So far it's at 31 MB, but it increases without bound by a few KB per second.
I've ended up with numerous VLANs, one for entertainment devices, one for security system(s), one for guests, one for IoT trash, etc.
If the devices are this level of untrusted, there's a lot of separation necessary.
IoT network yep, needed yesterday
What kind of functions it has that can't be replaced by:
- walking a few meters and pushing a physical button
- waiting a whopping minute for coffee to brew, instead of triggering it remotely
- have a short window to get to the train in the morning - want coffee on the train - don't particularly like drip machine coffee - want the water boiling when I wake up so that I can make coffee and get out of the house as quickly as possible - am more morally opposed to waking up five minutes earlier (pushing my wake time into the 4 o'clock hour) than I am to having a smart device.
I couldn't find a kettle that runs on a timer, and just taping the switch in the "on" position and hooking it up to a plug timer felt unsafe, so getting a stupid wifi kettle and using their stupid app to set it to auto-start was the best option. It's on its own network, though.
I do feel that over-automation is a thing
I use a Hario Switch to make coffee. It takes 3:30 to brew, so I pour the water and then brush my teeth and prep while waiting. Async coffee! I’m out the door as soon as the coffee is in the mug and get to the train station about 2 minutes before the train arrives.
This is possibly not an issue with a regular drip coffee machine. It’s definitely an issue with a kettle or, say, air fryer.
Just say it: you bought a smart kettle due to your completely adjustable preferences.
Thus-constrained, this person states that they're able to get 5 more minutes of sleep every night and still make coffee before taking the train to work. That's ~25 minutes per week, or ~1.8 hours per month.
They didn't have to choose to go to bed earlier in order to gain this time and still make coffee in the morning. They were going to make coffee with a kettle anyway and were constrained by a the necessity of maintainining ownership of a kettle with which to do that.
So they simply selected a kettle that can be safely automated so as to be ready at the right time every morning instead of one that cannot be. In exchange, they gain around 20 hours per year, for every year that this kettle lasts for. (What would you do for nearly an entire extra day, per year?)
Sure: It's adjustable, just as many constraints are.
Maybe there's even a coffee shop around the corner that they could work at instead, and they could just walk there and brew themselves a cup of coffee using the hot tap on the espresso machine before they start their shift.
But maybe that wouldn't fit into the constraint of being able to support they dwelling that they prefer to live in.
So maybe they could soften that constraint as well, and live a little lower. (Maybe they can soften enough constraints that they can just live under a bridge somewhere, with no permanent dwelling, no job, and no coffee. Perhaps, if we look hard enough, we might find that even the constraint of living a life at all adjustable.)
They can shift their daily schedule e.g. 30 minutes earlier and peacefully drink their coffee at home. They also should eat something at home or on their way, because hurrying in a cold morning with an empty stomach is not good. Source: personal experience. I did that for months as a student until I passed out one day in class.
If they don't like waiting for the train in the cold, they probably can find a warm place near the station, and wait there a little.
Sure, 120V is slower than 240V, but it's still pretty quick. If I'm boiling a full ass kettle for an iced tea pitcher it might take me 5 minutes. Only enough for a cup of tea is maybe 2 minutes.
2) brush teeth
3) brew coffee
?
In other words, these product decisions aren't really made on the rationale that internet connected coffee makers make sense from the standpoint of a consumer who simply wants coffee made...
It's more: "let's make smart coffee makers so that we can sell to 2 markets:
... and make more profits for ourselves".What hope do normies have?
None, without people like us in their families who are able and willing to help.
We as computer people need to internalize and accept the idea that helping our immediate and even extended family with technology is now part of defending human freedom. And we need to form ourselves into the best helpers we can be by learning how to teach and communicate well.
I am able and willing to help my parents get off of a lot of the spyware bullshit they have throughout their house, but they don't want to hear it. They liked the connected stuff and I think that they think I'm a little weird when I push back about why we can't trust corporations like Google or Microsoft to do everything.
"Nomad," the guy from the article, was already administering his parents' home LAN.
How do you get there? "Mom and Dad, we're going to set up your home network so that it's blended with my home network. To all the machines in your house and mine, it'll look like they're on the same network together. That'll make it easier for me to help you with any tech problems you're having, on your computer or on any smart device. The connection between our houses will be encrypted and secure" You're installing a router/firewall for them and adding to your WireGuard overlay network, but you're not using any of those words to tell them what's going on.
What to do next? "How was watching TV last night from {$TIMESTAMP_A} to {$TIMESTAMP_B}? Yeah, my network sentinel detected that your TV was sending your viewing habits out to somewhere on the Internet and warned me and blocked it. I can't tell what you were watching, but {$TV_BRAND} sure can." You're monitoring their LAN via the router/firewall you've set up, but you are again not using technical language.
Wherever spying is invisible and frictionless, make it loud and incessant. And continue to provide value to the family on the shared overlay network. Photo and home video backups, media server (it's like Netflix!), mutual offsite buddy backups, password management, a local Minecraft server for the kids and the cousins.
Build a network garden that is good enough to consider leaving the leviathans behind and build walls around it that are high enough to commit to leaving the leviathans behind.
Recommending they turn off ACR and other spyware on their TV is based on recent reporting is good and backed up by said reporting. Probably even recommending against too-good-to-be-true connected doorbells even.
Meanwhile, telling them not to use a first-party Google, Amazon, or Apple smart home speakers is a bit questionable when there's been pretty good audits over the years that show they really do only do wake word detection. You'll just sound like a crazy person if you can't point to some reporting on a device doing bad.
Folks be crazy.
I don't need voice-activated lights for the basement for when I head down with my arms full of laundry, or with a bunch of food to put into the freezer, or whatever shit I'm carrying. I don't need them to turn themselves back off after a time, either.
I mean: I could use any of a wide array of motion sensors, but they'll turn the lights on even when I'm just working in the kitchen near the basement stairs. (Or maybe I could use a beam curtain! Yeah! Now they only respond when a beam breaks, instead of when I'm working in the kitchen near the basement stairs!)
Or I could just put the shit down and flip the switch.
Or: Plan ahead, and flip the switch in advance. And then just flip it back off when I'm done down there.
But I chose this path anyway, and I like it this way. I invited the spies into my home very deliberately. (I also chose to carry an always-on pocket supercomputer with me wherever I go, and I have no way to observe what that thing is really doing at any given time.)
Think of all that sweet sweet food data that a fridge could on sell.