<story><title>I disabled WiFi on the new Samsung fridge</title><url>https://eattherich.club/@swaggboi/108382897807037127</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>IshKebab</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve worked in a big consumer electronics company and 2. is just a conspiracy theory. Nobody &lt;i&gt;wants&lt;/i&gt; their products to be unreliable or difficult to repair. They want them to be &lt;i&gt;cheap to manufacture&lt;/i&gt; and &lt;i&gt;unlikely to fail during the warranty period&lt;/i&gt;. Everything else stems from that.&lt;p&gt;Your other two points are broadly correct though. Also data collection is helpful for seeing how customers use products, which genuinely does influence development.</text></item><item><author>somenameforme</author><text>In my ever-cynical view, I imagine in most cases manufacturers don&amp;#x27;t, themselves, especially care about the data from their devices. I see various other motivations:&lt;p&gt;1) Price increases. It&amp;#x27;s &amp;quot;smart&amp;quot;. Pay us more.&lt;p&gt;2) Planned obsolescence. You have numerous new points of failure in your product + make repairing vastly more difficult.&lt;p&gt;3) Monetize collected data by selling it to interested parties. The data quality, or lack thereof, is a secondary concern.</text></item><item><author>thn-gap</author><text>Has anyone worked on fighting back this kind of telemetry&amp;#x2F;spyware of essential consumer appliances?&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m thinking something similar to what &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;adnauseam.io&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;adnauseam.io&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt; does, but but amplified:&lt;p&gt;1. Someone reverse engineer what does the device send to which address.
2. Block the particular device to access internet (and make it easy for others too).
3. Constantly send bogus data to the manufacturer so the personal data they get overall loses value or is unusable. Make it easy for a lot of people to do it as well, or even just rent a bot farm.&lt;p&gt;There&amp;#x27;s too many legit and good services that end up being turned down due to abuse and DDos, and they don&amp;#x27;t even bring anything good to the attackers. Why not using these techniques for something actually good to consumers privacy?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>alpaca128</author><text>&amp;gt; Nobody wants their products to be unreliable or difficult to repair.&lt;p&gt;Hard to believe when a printer manufacturer moves a commonly failing part from cartridges to the printer itself, then makes it impossible to repair that specific part without taking apart the whole thing and buying a replacement part for 160 bucks.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Also data collection is helpful for seeing how customers use products, which genuinely does influence development.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ll start calling it helpful once it actually improves product quality and usability.</text></comment>
<story><title>I disabled WiFi on the new Samsung fridge</title><url>https://eattherich.club/@swaggboi/108382897807037127</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>IshKebab</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve worked in a big consumer electronics company and 2. is just a conspiracy theory. Nobody &lt;i&gt;wants&lt;/i&gt; their products to be unreliable or difficult to repair. They want them to be &lt;i&gt;cheap to manufacture&lt;/i&gt; and &lt;i&gt;unlikely to fail during the warranty period&lt;/i&gt;. Everything else stems from that.&lt;p&gt;Your other two points are broadly correct though. Also data collection is helpful for seeing how customers use products, which genuinely does influence development.</text></item><item><author>somenameforme</author><text>In my ever-cynical view, I imagine in most cases manufacturers don&amp;#x27;t, themselves, especially care about the data from their devices. I see various other motivations:&lt;p&gt;1) Price increases. It&amp;#x27;s &amp;quot;smart&amp;quot;. Pay us more.&lt;p&gt;2) Planned obsolescence. You have numerous new points of failure in your product + make repairing vastly more difficult.&lt;p&gt;3) Monetize collected data by selling it to interested parties. The data quality, or lack thereof, is a secondary concern.</text></item><item><author>thn-gap</author><text>Has anyone worked on fighting back this kind of telemetry&amp;#x2F;spyware of essential consumer appliances?&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m thinking something similar to what &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;adnauseam.io&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;adnauseam.io&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt; does, but but amplified:&lt;p&gt;1. Someone reverse engineer what does the device send to which address.
2. Block the particular device to access internet (and make it easy for others too).
3. Constantly send bogus data to the manufacturer so the personal data they get overall loses value or is unusable. Make it easy for a lot of people to do it as well, or even just rent a bot farm.&lt;p&gt;There&amp;#x27;s too many legit and good services that end up being turned down due to abuse and DDos, and they don&amp;#x27;t even bring anything good to the attackers. Why not using these techniques for something actually good to consumers privacy?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mjburgess</author><text>Well calling it &amp;quot;planned&amp;quot; adds a conspiratorial element, maybe there&amp;#x27;s a better word.&lt;p&gt;The effect comes from many sources. When the engineering science is new, tech tends to be way overbuilt because the creators don&amp;#x27;t know what tolerances are. There&amp;#x27;s also the ratio of product cost to disposable income of the users. And to their wish for devices over time.&lt;p&gt;In any case, the natural tendency of a profit-optimizing system of competition is to throw away values (eg., repairability) that consumers at-purchase dont value. In this case, no biz is going to spend extra to include long-life features &lt;i&gt;at a loss&lt;/i&gt; to competitors who don&amp;#x27;t.&lt;p&gt;The remedy here is regulation, which is the mechanism which sets a floor on competition: since consumers at-purchase are at an extreme informational disadvantage, the gov. should require all biz to build in long-life features &lt;i&gt;given consumers do want them, long after purchase&lt;/i&gt;.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s not a conspiracy, more of a market failure. The market doesnt produce optimal outcomes in cases where these extreme information asymmetries are built in, ie., by the time the product is around for 10yr to be reivewed, it&amp;#x27;s retired. There isn&amp;#x27;t a way of getting that information to the consumer.</text></comment>