691
Homeowner baffled after washing machine uses 3.6GB of internet data a day (www.newsweek.com)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
194 comments fedilink hide all child comments
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] 103 points 2 years ago (19 children)

Mine plays a loud jingle when it's done, which seems to be enough for me.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 19 child comments
    •
  • [–] 72 points 2 years ago (9 children)

    Yup. There are two situations here:

    • I'm in my house and can hear the sound
    • I'm not at my house and don't care when it finishes

    If I'm at home and won't hear the sound for some reason, I'll just set an alarm on my phone. My washing machine tells me how long it'll take, so there's no guesswork here.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 9 child comments
    •
  • [–] 14 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    My washing machine tells me how long it'll take, so there's no guesswork here.

    Washing machines exist that are smarter than just running a fixed program. They adjust the program, and thus duration, based om how dirty the clothes are. The same goes for dryers that look at the actual humidity of the clothes to determine if they’re finished.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 3 child comments
    •
  • [–] 26 points 2 years ago*

    Sure, and if I'm off by a few minutes, that's totally fine. I honestly don't need to know the moment my clothes are done, it can wait 20-30 minutes usually. In general, a laundry run takes an hour, plus whatever soak time I choose.

    So I really don't need any network access. I guess it's fine if others want it, but I see it as a liability. If it connects to a network, that's a security vulnerability (don't want a laundry DOS) and another thing to break. Ideally, every model could optionally ship without it.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago* (3 children)

    Not trying to defend stupid internet connectivity but my washing machine is in the basement in a shared laundry room while I live on the second floor of the apartment building. No way I'll hear it beep so a notification would be very useful actually. This is a very common situation in Europe where a lot of people live in rental apartments.

    The problem is rather that there needs to be WiFi access in the laundry room.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 3 child comments
    •
  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (2 children)

    Is this washing machine yours? Or is it owned by the landlord? If it's the landlord's, that's a different problem entirely, since now you need multiple people to have separate configurations on the same device to get notifications, but only when their particular load is finished.

    I can absolutely see a reason to have "smart" laundromats for things like error codes, abandoned loads, usage statistics, maintenance history, full coin reservoir, etc. That's the type of problem a shared laundry room would have as well, and it would be fairly easy to add a "tap to notify" feature where you scan a QR code or tap with NFC to get remote access to it.

    But for a typical home situation where the laundry machine is the apartment or house, I really don't see a point, and it's just a liability.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
    •
  • [–] 16 points 2 years ago

    Its enough for me too. But not everyone has the same use case and environment. I definitely see why someone would want this.

    What I disagree with is that it needs to communicate to the internet to do this. It adds delay and potential for outage if your internet is out. But they do this so they can force you to get their app and milk you for extra data to sell. Internet capable smart devices are to harvest data not grant features. Features could be done better by ZigBee and a hub, but that doesnt grant the device a way to phone home

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 13 points 2 years ago (7 children)

    Mine is in my garage, and I can't hear the jingle from inside the house.

    But two power monitoring smart plugs+ home assistant fixed that issue

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 7 child comments
    •
  • [–] 0 points 2 years ago (6 children)

    But two power monitoring smart plugs+ home assistant fixed that issue

    A timer on your phone would have done the same with less hassle.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 6 child comments
    •
  • [–] 9 points 2 years ago (4 children)

    Most washing machines have sensors and do not dry based on a timer. The program time is just a rough estimate, if clothes are still wet or soap bubbles are still present it will do extra rinses or spins.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 4 child comments
    •
  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    Correct. I often find myself going downstairs to the washing machine after 2 hours because it said 1:30h, and then it still needs another 12 minutes.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 3 child comments
    •
  • [–] -1 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    You could then just set the timer to 2:15h. Still much easier than setting up "smart" tech. It's like when a buddy of mine spent much money and put quite a bit of work into achieving that his smart light bulb lights up when he's nearing the apartment door whereas I just screw in a bulb with an integrated movement sensor that achieves exactly the same thing without pairing, sending out gigabytes of data from spying on me, and costing loads of money.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
    •
  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago*

    Still much easier than setting up "smart" tech.

    That's really on a person by person basis. I'm a software engineer, and have already automated a lot of aspects of my life, so adding another device and a new automation took me like 10 minutes to setup.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago*

    Setting a timer is more of a hassle than having my washing machine notify me when it's done - however is most convenient for me. Due to the layout of my home, I am unable to hear the washing machine directly. And setting a timer on my phone sounds like a pain in the ass. And sometimes my wife or kids started a load and I don't know when they did that, but I need to do some laundry myself, so I need to know if the washer is free but I don't want to go all the way to the basement to find out.

    Luckily, my washer connects to my Wi-Fi and, unfortunately, to the Internet. I very much like that it will notify me on my smart devices around the house and on my phone. It's actually a great feature. Similarly, I can see my next oven notifying me when it's preheated. Similar reasons - might be doing laundry or out of earshot when it's ready to cook.

    The problem here isn't the feature itself. It's undeniably useful. The issue is that LG's programmers somehow wrote code that resulted in a tremendous amount of web traffic considering the extremely limited data that could possibly be collected by a washing machine. Think about every tiny thing you did today and write it all down in great detail. You could probably write a short novel if you really tried. And all that can be written to a file less than 1MB in size. The washing machine did not, could not collect that amount of private information about you without also sending audio and/or video. And I'm going to go ahead and assume it has neither microphones or cameras.

    So, in the end, this is pretty clearly a programming error. My guess: The washing machine sent a json file containing:

    • The status of the washer (basic functionality)
    • the ssid's and signal strengths of every nearby WiFi and Bluetooth signal (this is personal data they'd sell - which is gross)
    • Mac address, rtt, ip address, and dns address of every device on the LAN (this is more personal data they'd sell - which is still gross) *Basic hardware health data including counters for how many cycles it has ran in its lifetime, how long it's been running, total revolutions of each motor, temperature, and humidity readings (more basic functionality)

    And, due to a programming error, it sent this exact same data every second, uncompressed, all day, every day, until the stupid thing gets updated with a firmware patch.

    My point is, that's simply not useful data to collect at that sort of frequency. It's true - LG wants that data , but it absolutely does not want that data sent to their servers every millisecond of every day. They want it probably once per hour. Maybe even once every 5 minutes. LG doesn't want 4GB(!) of the exact same data. Collecting and storing data costs real money and infrastructure.

    TLDRB I'm going to guess that someone screwed up on the coding side and that's how you get such egregious amounts of network traffic from a washing machine.

    But the one I own does a great job of notifying me and doesn't show the same traffic patterns. So I still think those and features are useful. Eventually you'll probably be glad to have them in your appliances too. There's a ton of use cases for it and it's quickly becoming standard since the technology is incredibly cheap to produce.

    Source: a programmer

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent