Comment by Grombobulous
1 day ago
I don’t dispute the purpose of the data collection, but I can’t believe this quantity of data collection is intentional.
There’s no way Keurig is has the intention of paying the kind of costs required to collect a terabyte of data every two weeks for millions of people who own their coffee makers.
There must be some kind of bug here. I imagine if you unplugged it and plugged it in again the data usage would settle down.
As article says, the coffee machine didn't 'collect' or phone home a TB of data. It just saturated the local network looking for data to collect. This doesn't cost Keurig or any other IoT device company a single cent. It might have been a bug, or maybe not. Without some bad press, like this post; they have no incentive to change anything
Yeah but that can’t even be useful can it? What’s that going to find that only using 500 MB of probes wouldn’t have found?
Still seems buggy.
Engineer: How often should our software scan the local network looking for new devices? Once a day? Once an hour?
Manager: We might miss something. Since scanning doesn't cost us anything, better do it a thousand times a second!
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I don't understand giving the benefit of the doubt to a company that is actively spying on its customers, which in some jurisdictions would be illegal.
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It uses energy paid for by the homeowner.
Than What is the meaning of "used"?
I mean, it wasn't clear to me without the explanation (I too thought it used 1TB of public internet data), but it's clear now that it is accurate (it literally used 1 TB of private network data)
It might not seem to be anything (people will assume private network traffic is free) but there is a cost - it's capacity that could be used for other purposes, eg. home alarms.
They could be sued in small claims court.
Here that means no lawyers, no discovery, $100 to file in plain language, and a company employee (not a company lawyer, or a contractor, or a temp employee) must attend or they default.
$15k damages.
Reasons it could happen? Imagine grandpa has a tech come out 4 times, because his network is super slow. EG, this thing pounding his wifi for its scans.
Small claims court in the US typically requires actual damages, and doesn't add punitive damages.
Grandpa gets reimbursed for the four techs who came out, that's it.
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Probes create much more traffic locally than it takes to backhaul a summary of their results.
1TB still smells like a bug
My naive assumption would be it's looking for events in time, like sign of occupancy. For example, when your phone leaves the wifi network.
But still must be a bug.
I was thinking that repeated small probes add up quicker than you'd expect. But this is ~1.1MB/sec, which still seems a few orders of magnitude off.
Now I'm left wondering what this traffic actually is - assuming probe (arp/icmp) packet size of 64 byte, that's 17kpps. I don't think an ESP32 class Internet-of-Trash chip can even do that. Even bulk transfers rather than small probes would be pushing it.
Perhaps this thing found some fellow-traveler device streaming video on a port it happened to connected to?
... the linked xit says it "broadcast 1TB of data". So maybe some protocol with a much larger packet than icmp, spammed in a hard loop without any delay?
One thing that confuses me is, well, at this point in the data collection game, is there still value in this 'local' data? I mean, everyone is doing it, collecting the same data - hasn't that decreased the value? Obviously not, but I still wonder.
> everyone is doing it
Not in my house. What is even the point of connecting a coffee machine or a washing machine to the internet? I think my washing machine advertised that I could download new washing cycle programs in the app. Who on earth cares?
If there's one thing you can be absolutely certain of it's that every scrap of the data they collect is either making companies money hand over fist or they strongly believe that it will soon. No company is going to bother collecting, storing, (hopefully securing), backing up, and analyzing all this data without a reason, and to them money and power are the only reasons that matter.
Right now companies are somewhat limited in how much use they can get out their horde of private and personal information, but AI is changing that rapidly. As long as you don't mind a huge rate of error (and companies don't because it all becomes "good enough" at a large enough scale) it's basically perfect for the task of digging through endless amounts of information and spewing out bullet points.