Yeah, I’m absurdly suspicious of pretty much everything connected to the internet these days. I’m suspicious of any cameras, of people randomly happening to take a picture with me in the background. I’m suspicious of talking out loud around my phone…the future sucks.

Although, thankfully the pandemic has given me a seemingly never-ending excuse to wear something over my face at all times.

I get that, I have a smart oven, washer, dryer and dishwasher. All connected to the internet (private guest network just in case), and they all send updates to one Telegram group chat using IFTTT. It's pretty convenient to get updates when a device is done.

I could see a connected dishwasher being useful if all water using apps (liances, not lications) could coordinate with the water softener to determine if it needs to cycle before they start (and to automatically start once the soft water is ready).

Is that even a thing?

I hate Hanlon's Razor with a passion. It's just a way to introduce plausible deniability for cases that do involve malice. Not that this stuff necessarily is malicious, I just think it's dumb to rule out maliciousness any time it could be incompetence.

Right, it's just a front door lol. I never considered that was a thing.

I have been with a few companies as an engineer, and can at least confirm that you are right from my experience. Nobody really needs a backdoor to get massive amounts of data. The ToS for most software makes it so they can already do whatever they want with it. It's pretty easy to get a lot of data just by having people use their services normally.