Technology

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