An engineer got curious about how his iLife A11 smart vacuum worked and monitored the network traffic coming from the device. That’s when he noticed it was constantly sending logs and telemetry data to the manufacturer — something he hadn’t consented to. The user, Harishankar, decided to block the telemetry servers’ IP addresses on his network, while keeping the firmware and OTA servers open. While his smart gadget worked for a while, it just refused to turn on soon after. After a lengthy investigation, he discovered that a remote kill command had been issued to his device.
Yeah, good point. Owners of Samsung “smart” refrigerators started seeing ads on them recently.
I’m sure there was some sort of legal terms that users had to agree to to enable that, but it still feels like a scam. Some amount of those fridge owners would not have bought the fridge if they knew there would be ads on it at any point in time.