> WTF!! When did we land in the middle of a Black Mirror episode?

At least a decade ago! The first TVs with Automatic Content Recognition shipped in 2013[0]. There was also a brief panic in 2024 about air fryers spying on people[1].

And of course practically every website you visit is doing a full session recording with mouse movements and key presses captured.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_content_recognition

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/nov/05/air-fryer...

There is a singular patent owned by Sony that stands between you and being required to physically acknowledge ads on your TV: https://patents.google.com/patent/US8246454B2/en

Do you remember how a series of crazy coincidences and freak accidents kept preventing the LHC from being turned on? What if the LHC was causing world-ending or life-ending events, and we simply kept surviving only in thinner and thinner slices of amplitude (timelines) where those freak accidents happened, but where also more improbable world conditions took place?

No one cares. There’s little serious pushback to privacy invasions by big tech. Flock cameras have been a rare exception. Half the people “have nothing to hide” and half aren’t willing to give up the convenience that the popular app or gadget gives them.

Unauthorized Bread

Ha, they will just form a mesh network with your neighbor’s TV and Kuerig and upload all its sniffed coffee preferences data that way.

There are companies that sell people's home ip address as a VPN/Proxy for anyone who wants to use it for anything. They call it "residential ip's". People use them for web scraping, but probably tons of illegal stuff too. AI companies use them to not get blocked.

I've heard that they put it in IoT devices, free Android apps that people use on their TVs, free phone apps, games, prob lots more.. The companies advertise it like its super safe only legit normal people borrow the internet from these people but then in fine print it'll say its not our responsibility etc.

What I have been wondering is - since they don't seem to care or check what people are using the "residential ip's" for, what happens when someone does a bunch of illegal stuff on some random person's home IP and ends up raided by cops?

I feel like the world is going in these directions.. the excuse is always "well, they clicked Yes on the Terms of Service! They agreed to it!"

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

Probes create much more traffic locally than it takes to backhaul a summary of their results.

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.

You can also map a home out depending on signal strength. That gives you approximate size of home which gives you approximate income.

It can also correlate it with geolocation data. Google, for eg, sniffs all broadcasted SSIDs with their StreetView cars. If you can pick up on a SSID (or any of the MAC addresses of the other devices), you can buy the data set that includes it which further pinpoints demographics given the neighborhood AMI.

You can also build behavioral profiles patterns based on things like, for eg, if a baby monitor model is present or a robot vacuum, if certain devices only connect at certain times, etc.

I think the general rule for adtech is that profile guesstimates just need to be around 70%+ fidelity to determine if a sale can be made.

Lastly, you can also just sell the data on the gray market. The more datapoints, the higher the price. Most consumer product companies do that since we have little-to-no data privacy laws and the people who seem the most aware of it also are generally very apathetic and disinterested in advocating for them.

They can get a profile of when you're in which room, how many people are in the house, etc. That's useful for targeting (e.g., up at 5am, leaves, comes back in an hour or two will have you profiled (more complicated than this since it's usually a fuzzy vector thing, but for the sake of argument) as somebody who goes to the gym, maybe leading to creatine advertising or other whatever), and also for attribution (e.g., a TV ad is shown, somebody gets up, and a purchase is made from a device known to exist at that household, regardless of whether it's behind a VPN).

If you have even very crude data from somewhere else for the targeting, improvements in attribution tech are actually the more important factor. The adtech company mostly doesn't even care who you are, just whether the ad turned into a purchase or not, and that's where a lot of the invasive tracking comes from. They'd be perfectly happy with a quickly changing "identity" if they knew it was reliable and stable between ad and purchase.

Knowing what TV you own, what phone models are used in your house, and what other devices you own tells advertisers about your spending patterns and income.

> but how much value even is there is the data that a spyware coffee machine could collect about your home? What is the marginal value of that data?

Scale it up - make that millions of homes. Now there is godlike strategic value. Esp when "borrowed" by 3 letter agencies.

If it scans the network and sees a smart dishwasher, smart washer/drier, and smart lights, but no smart fridge, I imagine its worth something to a company like Samsung to start targeting that customer with ads for a smart fridge.

It’s not so hard to get root shell on some routers via the admin panel, which usually has the same password as the wifi network or a default password. From there the device can capture dns logs.

All data is valuable. Even something as simple as the MAC address to your iPhones WiFi or Bluetooth chip is worth something to dataprofilers.

That new Amazon page that shows you what it has inferred about you told my friend that he “clips [his] fingernails approximately every two months.” He makes extensive and enthusiastic use of Echo products in his household, but I have no idea how it could've possibly reached that conclusion (and neither does he!).

If you buy a Keurig machine you've already signalled you're a sucker. (sorry)

Presumably during setup and connection to the AP it has a ToS. Doubtful they just unboxed, plugged in, and it connected to the right AP and went.

It's not allowed in the EU. Not without consent.

It's implied consent when you give it access to your WiFi.

Why you would give a coffee maker access to your WiFi is the real question,

You would have to show the judge how you have been harmed and the judge will want to know what the damages are.

Yes, this is why everybody wants to make vehicles and refrigerators and thermostats and ereaders with cellular and/or wireless: subscription revenue from bulk data purchasers of what their scans reveal. IIRC Amazon was an industry leader in this space by showing book authors what page you stopped reading on, and then bulk assessing that data at scale to estimate which sentence or word; of course, Google’s Android remains the most successful at-scale deployment of data collection for advertisers worldwide. See also, for recent context, the top comment (and others) of the LG Smart TV problem (30 days ago, 1012 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49592375

Funny thing, that. Go into an electronics store now and pay attention to the TV boxes and the printer boxes. The amount of crazy fine print on both of them now is absurd. The printer boxes all now have lots of fine print about the various ink protection and DRM schemes and subscription services, the TV boxes have everything ranging from binding arbitration on the box (LG) to "(brand) accounts are REQUIRED to use this TV" (Visio).

Customers are gonna get lost in the sauce and skip right past all of that and toss the packaging.

"Is this why everybody wants to make appliances with wireless?"

Which raises in my mind the obvious defense, which is that if you try to put four or five of these devices on your network they'll be too busy interfering with each other for them to actually spy on anything.

Let the wiretaps wiretap the wiretaps. Keeps 'em busy, makes 'em feel like they're doing something important.

    > What is my purpose?

    You wiretap the wiretaps wiretapping our wiretaps.

    > Oh my god.