[fnands]

The dishwasher at my office has WiFi.

Why do companies insist on connecting every single device to the internet? Fortunately it's mostly an optional feature, so still works just fine without it, but in general it's a pretty strong signal to me to not buy that product.

[autoexec]

In addition to collecting and selling every scrap of you your private data they can get their hands on, having 24 hour access to the internet also means that at any time they can push updates that disable features you paid for so that they can start charging you a monthly fee to regain access to them.

Any CEO whose company engages in spying and theft should be criminally charged and thrown behind bars just as you or I would be for those same acts, but right now companies can do pretty much anything they want to you and if they do happen to face any consequence it'll just be a slap on the wrist that costs them a fraction of the profit they made ripping you off and violating your privacy.

[thegrey_one]

I thought this was pretty much a known fact by now. To make more money. They sell the data, or monetize it somehow. They disguise doing it under all kinds of "features" which indeed might be useful for some people. What should ring your alarm bells is any device that needs you to make an account, at least once when setting it up. That's valuable data, who/where/email/phone number etc. If you cannot fully use the product without at least one initial access to the internet, your data will be monetized, that's the reason you're not able of using it, they need to get something out of you. Of-course there's features that don't work, or make any sense, without internet access. But if you cannot wash your clothes without an account/initial access to the internet...that's sus.

[dlenski]

> The dishwasher at my office has WiFi.

At one of the AWS builds I worked at there was a water dispenser. It had one button to dispense cold still water, one for fizzy, one for hot water, etc.

Instead of JUST PRESSING THE BUTTON WITH YOUR FINGER, you could—and I am not making this up—download an app that would allow you to pair to the dispenser via a QR code, and then remotely trigger the water-dispensing action… so that you wouldn't have to press the button.

Absolutely insane.

Yeah, I imagine that this feature was dreamed up during the early part of the COVID pandemic where it was hypothesized that COVID spread on high-touch surfaces. Still doesn't make it any less insane. (And also, that theory was pretty clearly highly sus from the start.)

[tgsovlerkhgsel]

It's cheap to do, some people like it and it can be sold to them as a premium feature, and it enables future enshittification with subscriptions and other revenue opportunities.

Ignore the security issues for a bit, because most buyers don't know/think about those. If it wasn't for the enshittification, having your dishwasher online would be useful. Not groundbreaking, but being able to look up how long it still has without having to walk to the kitchen, get a notification when it's done, be able to look up error codes or check the status of consumables would be kind of nice if it weren't for the downsides that come with it. But those downsides are not something people think about.