[News] LG to put Wi-Fi in all its products

[StyM]

http://www.fudzilla.com/news/wearabl...l-its-products

LG says that all its products will ship with Wi-Fi connectivity from this year.

LG marketing VP David VanderWaal says that "starting this year" all of LG's home appliances will feature "advanced Wi-Fi connectivity".

One of the flagship appliances that will make good on this promise is the Smart Instaview Refrigerator, a webOS-powered Internet-connected fridge that among other things supports integration with Amazon's Alexa service.

While this might be a good thing in cases of flagship devices but just sticking Wi-Fi in everything is going to create a security nightmare. After all how are LG or anyone planning to update their appliances? Most people who don?t use the Wi-Fi are never going to bother connecting to anything and that is just going to be an open port sitting waiting some hacker?s attention.

What is also a problem is that if your whole house gets a virus you are going to have a hell of a job finding out what the source was and what you are supposed to unplug.

Also, there is the small matter of some appliance makers might be a little naughty about using their smart devices to serve up ads or give audio or video recordings to law enforcement.

LG might be more likely than most to know what it is doing, but the life of a fridge or washing machine is a lot longer than a computer. Our fridge is 15 years old and works fine, what will be the state of computer security in 15 years? time? Many are going to find that their fridge is running the security equivalent of Windows XP.

[Sparky]

Just, why? I need my fridge to keep food cold, not tell me via text message that my food is cold.

[drmrlordx]

It's there to phone home and gather data on you, so LG can sell it to buyers.

[Sparky]

Like what? The fact that I am a bachelor and my fridge is usually fairly empty? I mean, what kind of data can a fridge seriously gather?

[drmrlordx]

Shopping patterns. Anyone that can develop a purchasing pattern on you can then sell it to targeted ad services.

The whole point is to develop an integrated consumer dossier on as many people as possible.

[Sparky]

Still not sure how it is supposed to know what and how many of what I have in the fridge unless I tell it, or unless it has a bunch cameras in it. Whatever, my point still stands that it is really stupid and pointless for the majority of people, and as the article mentions most will likely never even bother hooking it up to wifi.

Curious what a "hacker" would do to a fridge though. What, control the temperature through the wifi? That would be rather dumb for a "set and forget" thing - since when do people adjust their fridge temp with any sort of regularity?

The more I think about this the dumber a wifi-enabled fridge sounds.

[swiftex]

They'll start rfid tagging and when you're low on milk they'll add it to your virtual shopping list. Makes a bachelors life a lot easier going forward.