So you absolutely don't want any Samsung appliances, even the non 'smart' ones.
In my market Samsung has driven away all the service techs. We managed to find one, and he said he only works on Samsung because it’s a captive market now. He complained that Samsung micromanages field services to a degree that they’re killing the service ecosystem for their appliances.
We had him try to fix an issue with a dryer. On his way out he looked at the fridge and said “has the ice maker stopped working yet?” It actually had stopped working a year earlier. We didn’t get it fixed then because Samsung didn’t have anyone to send, and there were no third parties we could find (even unauthorized).
We’ve been replacing all our appliances with other brands.
Edit: PS - depending on the model of fridge, the ice maker infrastructure (typically near the filter) eventually start pooling water and might freeze in inconvenient places. Watch out for that. YMMV.
Also, I assume you can still do what I did for my current LG TV, skip the wifi setup, plug in AppleTV and use it purely as dumb TV.
Then the advertisers could buy more accurate information to improve product placement in movies/tv shows.
The sci-fi version could be a TV that can recognize what kind of things are in the room or clues for the viewer's socioeconomic status and emotional state to bring up content (or even change it in real time) to maximize resonance with the viewer.
I get that, but at some point you're installing it in your house with non-color corrected lighting and viewing it during the daytime with your terrible human eyes. I get why 200-300 lumens of peak brightness can make a difference, but does 2-3% of color correctness really matter to people as they watch their low bitrate netflix stream?
Maybe we'd all be better off if we calmed down a bit on chasing the specs, and focused on something else for a while.
All tvs from all manufacturers have microphones and they do listen an sell info.
Everyone things Facebook is listening but it really is your tv.
You can refuse to give them a direct WiFi connection, but just wait until they start using IOT mesh networks like Amazon Sidewalk as a fallback channel (assuming some aren't quietly doing that already).
In 2030, it will be "Well, the TV sends a 24/7 video of my living room to Samsung, plays a 5 minute ad every 10 minutes of content, displays in 480i unless I pay a $100/mo subscription, and it will kill my pets, but hey, it has the best display in the world, so I'm thinking about buying it."
..and fucking bricked my phone. Right there on the spot in the middle of a sale.
Plus the whole Tizen situation on the Gear watches was incredibly disappointing. I paid all kinds of money for a nice watch that had zero utility outside of Samsung's tiny, tiny walled garden and their very few, very broken apps. I'll never not be mad about it.
The problem is that even if you can amass such an IOT botnet, you still need people on the ground to conduct such burglaries, and that scales poorly. Even if you tried to operate on a SaaS model, you're going to find that your clients (ie. drug users who want their next fix) are fickle and are very eager to snitch on you to the police, making it very likely that your botnet gets dismantled. On the other hand running a DDoS or "residential proxy" botnet comes with none of these hassles.
Also, while "smart" Samsung fridges are the topic of this article, the concept generalizes to any internet connected devices within "smart" homes which exhibit a combination of "hackable" and revealing-of-occupancy. Samsung refrigerators are unlikely to be the most attractive vector when there are e.g. "smart" light bulbs out there which are vulnerable and never going to be patched because the manufacturer went out of business.
FWIW, I'm not a pen tester or security specialist — just a security-conscious generalist software developer. I see evidence left behind of scanning attacks in web logs, but haven't actually crafted such mass attacks myself.
> Please connect the Samsung^R Family^tm H.U.B.^TM^R to the internet to continue the refrigeration cycle. You refrigeration cycle will end in 28 hours unless reconnected to the Samsung^TM KNOX^R Server System for your security
> Please reposition the Samsung^R Family^tm H.U.B.^TM^R so that 6G Connectivity can be established to start the refrigeration cycle.
> Please unblock all visual obstructions the Samsung^R Family^tm H.U.B.^TM^R Camera and reauthorize usage to continue the refrigeration cycle.
> Please unblock all visual obstructions the Samsung^R Family^tm H.U.B.^TM^R Camera and Reauthorize using your government ID, fingerprint, iris scan and cryptographically singed anus print to continue usage. Failure to comply will cost you 25 Social Credits. You have 27 hours left.
Caution, incoming naive comment(s): Companies should put their customer's well being before profits, because we all know most people don't understand what's going on with their digital devises. (Yes, customers should care more, but companies shouldn't be allowed to take advantage of those who can't grasp the techiness of the products.) Techiness, I just made that up. :)
This might be illegal for publicly traded companies. Shareholder maximization forces them to deceive their customers.
If you wanna skip some chapters and see where all of this ends up, go check out how Unity is doing after John Riccitiello fucked them.
https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/tovala
A SMART-OVEN-PAIRED SUBSCRIPTION MEAL SERVICE.
I was guilty of it myself at times during my career, but luckily I was able to retire just before things started to get unavoidably shitty.
I can't always avoid the latter category on principle.
We need a law that requires IoT devices have a method of shutting off connectivity entirely, and requiring that core functionality remains intact.
I wouldn't consider buying a smart/Samsung refrigerator at all but I'm curious, is having blockchain, AI, and a Samsung account mandatory here? Or do they allow for discerning users who don't want that stuff? Is that market segment important to them?
No, it is not. Cheaper fridges with ads sell more and make more.
They’re so deep in advertising that the only feature they can think their customers are interested in are related to seeing ads.
The type of corpo-speak that gives an mba a rock hard erection.
Vulgar jokes aside, I want to know who is buying ads on fridges and what the roas on a fridge ad is.
Who knows, really? But maybe the same people who put ads on the gas station pumps that I use?
Those things blare at max volume and I still have no idea what they're selling.
Amusing anecdote: About 60 years ago, my grandfather (immigrant who was not well versed in mass-production) wrote a letter to the local newspaper asking that they omit the advertisements when they built his copy of the paper. "I never read them" he said.
My mother had to explain to him how his copy was gonna be just like everyone else's.
This is so annoying, Amazon did it with Kindle, now Samsung with fridges?!
It’s way too frequent and runs at random times in the middle of a movie so I always choose Accept.
Give me a dumb TV any time of the day now
This works until apple enshitifies
In my experience, they've been fine for a few years so far.
Unless you have root and can do anything the hardware is capable of, it's not your device. And you shouldn't let any sort of non-owned devices on your network.
Why? Cause devices controlled by other orgs are a foothold situation. And we've had countless attacks of footholds being used as internal points of attack, DDoS, and other attacks.
That also means that all your "cloud devices" should be able to work 100% offline. If not, return them as defective.
Devices that do need to be on the internet but I can foresee no reason they ever need to talk to anything else on the network go on their own VLAN (down to the level of my VR headset since it had a Meta logo on the box...).
My boys gaming PC can't even see my desktop (since there isn't a scenario where it needs to).
Other than the "smart" TV I own nothing "Smart" because I don't want anything smart.
I am adverse to being trapped with rental hardware masquerading as as 'sale'. Almost all corporate cloudshit is that.
As a counter example, I have 2 of these opengarage for my garage doors. They work superbly and integrate seamlessly with HomeAssistant.
And yes, I control them completely. FLOSS and all. And they just work.
Their smart TV stuff used to be marginally interesting. When Samsung TV Plus launched it was fantastic. They weren’t yet sure of how to handle ads so even the ad space was still nice, and marginally useful.
As they figured out the ad strategy, apps started disappearing and new ones appeared that couldn’t be uninstalled.
Then the OS updates started cratering performance. I have a Samsung smart TV from after 2020 that takes about 4 seconds to register a single remote control command in the smart TV GUI.
Even if you don't suspect malfeasance / advertising / surveillance, a lot of these devices and their software are sloppily developed and highly insecure
Moral of the story is... always double check your router settings to make sure enshittified iot devices aren't making you look like a newb.
Well the real question is why would you buy a connected fridge in the first place. Not that I visit fridges alleys in stores on a regular basis but I have never actually seen one.
It’s getting so you don’t have a real choice. You can buy a fridge (or any appliance pretty much) that is basic and doesn’t do the connected thing. But often you want the upscaled models because of real hardware features that are desirable. And these are always bundled with the “connectivity” options. It used to be you just ignored these bits. But they’re getting more and more invasive.
most updates are downgrades in my experience unless it addresses something very specific
Block it entirely, and hope it that doesn't connect to your Samsung phone via Bluetooth or WiFi and use it as a proxy.
If the answer to your question involved giving money to Samsung, then you asked the wrong question, and you need to do better next time.
Naturally when my laptop is using its wifi to create a hotspot it isn't actually connected to the internet, so they never actually get access to the internet.
(Doesn't work if you actually want the internet, and not just wifi, related features of course)
I use ControlD and it's blocking 38% of all DNS requests in my household. 8% of that is IoT telemetry. It's unbelievable how much of this bullshit is built into the products we use.
You know, bit like Microsoft forces you to create online account after installation is done
I bought a Samsung watch once, had to reverse it to enable functionality that was advertised a year before but never delivered. It died because the watch decided to suck in water during a reboot while swimming, they quoted me almost the full price to repair it, even though it was clearly a software bug that caused another advertised feature (namely it's ipx rating) to fail.
And while I also wouldn't give Xiaomi iot devices on the network full internet access, at least I can use those things normally.
I agree with you 100% about Samsung. They make nice hardware, but the software experience is among the worst in the industry. I don't know how they can be considered a premium product. I would never use one of their phones again. Straight up adware. I'm surprised they don't inject ads into the photos you take. They have ads everywhere else - even in the phone dialing app. Their TV's are still good as long as you don't connect them to the internet. Once they start putting LTE radios in them to download ads without wifi, I will be done with those too.
This is deliberate
But Samsung's ad behavior led me to buy a Vizio TV instead.
"This acquisition is not merely about expanding Walmart's product lineup but rather part of a sophisticated commercial strategy to integrate its retail operations, owned media channels and TV hardware into a cohesive ecosystem. This ecosystem is designed to generate and share data, influence shopping behavior and, ultimately, drive sales through an innovative approach to advertising..." "...By owning a television manufacturer, Walmart can now directly serve and, crucially, measure the impact of ads on consumer behavior. This capability significantly enhances Walmart's potential to convert advertisements into retail purchases."
https://www.forbes.com/councils/forbesbusinessdevelopmentcou...
I stubbornly refuse to ever connect my TV to the internet.
Most of us here see it for what it is, because we know what happens to the data.
I think the future is going to have more of this.
But, I can also imagine people paying more for almost everything that is ad-supported today to get non-ad supported versions in the future, not because of the data concerns, but because of the opportunity for status signalling - ad-supported devices like this will be seen as something "only poor people have" within two decades. I'm not sure if that's a good thing or not.
There's already parallels around this to an extent. I pay Apple money every month for storage, ad-free TV, music and games, confident my data is my data. As a result, they might have a customer for life, because the alternatives are awful in comparison even if I pay less per month or overall for them.
The thing that makes corporations give better warranty support is not more money. Giving them more money does not incentivize them to suddenly give better service or make higher quality goods. The thing is consumer protection laws. In the EU, consumer goods have a minimum two-year warranty period. This incentivizes higher quality manufacturing.
this attitude strikes me as remarkably naive in 2025. apple is well on its way down the slippery slope.
Will it? Investors would prefer full price fridges with full price ads.
Most consumers won't even know they've installed adware until the appliance is turned on, and what are they gonna do? go to all the effort of returning and buying another fridge?
Captive audience
And while investors would prefer full price fridges with full price ads, the ad economy only makes sense once you have decent reach, so it makes sense to lower the cost of acquisition of the device, take the hit as a customer acquisition cost and then sell the larger reach to advertisers.
This is the model for every ad-supported device and service to date, I'm not sure they're going to reinvent those economics for a fridge.
No screens except a little lcd at the top when you open it to see the temps
No WiFi, no Bluetooth, just a cold fucking box
It's one of the creepiest because of just how close to the present day it is.
I've been shopping for a new fridge lately, and from what I gather most "smart" fridges are still extremely expensive and that makes "non-smart" fridges still very desirable. In other words, "smart" features may not be new, but they aren't standard on a typical fridge... yet.
I have a Samsung Bespoke, for example, and you can 100% turn the ice-making off and just use that part of the freezer for more freezer space. No screen, the from it blank because all the water dispensing stuff is on the inside and I think (?) you can get one without it
I just want a high quality, decent-looking box that stops food from going off.
This has to be one of the silliest solutions in search of a problem I've ever seen. The fridge costs $3000, by the way.
But you won't find that here, and it's not going to be coming in an update. This fridge can't properly identify fruits and veggies, let alone anything in any sort of packaging.
As I demo the thing, it keeps taking snapshots of the back of my head and insists that the fridge is just packed full of kiwis.
If a Fridge had a barcode scanner built into it, that might be a start.
And it can't register anything placed in the flex drawer, freezer, or fridge doors. In order to actually take advantage of its fridge inventory system, you still have to manually enter in or correct every single item you place into your fridge.
It's inconvenient for looking up recipes, since fridges are not placed for visibility from your countertop. It can be used for music but the speakers aren't worth the extra money. Videos and movies? The screen's the wrong aspect ratio for anything but big screen TikTok. And again, fridges are not positioned to gather around.
And that last bit is the crux of the issue. I've talked to our Samsung reps and they keep talking about fridges like they're gathering points. Like people congregate around their fridges. That was the guiding principle behind this fridge, and it's so disconnected from reality that the appliance itself can't help but be irredeemably pointless.
But the fact that this gets retrofitted to fridges that people already bought, without any way of opting out or other mitigation, is criminal. Is this a lawsuit in the making? Am I naive?
These fridges are $3500 typically, and theoretically an MSRP of $4700. They're at the high end of consumer appliances.
I don't believe it's a lawsuit in the making, this is (at least partially) America, land of freedom from consumer protections, but it is horrid.
Another concern is energy consumption. In this age of energy star and touting how efficient appliances are, it doesn't make sense to have a screen that is always-on.
The real killer feature Samsung needs is an automatic warranty. I would never buy Samsung again, unless they started a new trend where all repairs are covered for 10 years (not sold as an add-on during checkout).
This is not. An appliance—which should never be connected to the Internet in the first place—that costs 4 digits in USD should never show you ads in any way. You obviously don't "loathe" ads if you're even capable of reasoning about that kind of behavior. Stop trying to shove ads 24/7 in every millimeter of available space.
On the upside, it will be very easy to find more reliable and cheaper fridges than that.
But a personally funny thing about this particular episode, to me, is that when I left a very nice CS PhD program, to switch schools, to work on AI+HCI for software agents (before the enabling AI tech was ready)... the most common soundbite that the PI gave to prospective corporate sponsors who visited most days, was something like... "You could have a 'digital butler', who knows what you have in your fridge, and orders milk when you're running out."
(Aside: The students working on agents and wearable computing at the time were actually disproportionately ones also interested in privacy, at the university. Maybe because we were Internet-savvy from shortly before the dotcom gold rush (default Internet person sentiment was pro-privacy, pro-altruism, etc.), or maybe because we tended to be technical and thinking forward about emerging networked applications, and could guess where this was going.)
On HN, we always see a bunch of loud voices about various facets of IoT dystopia, but that doesn't reflect the broad population, yet. And as more people start to become aware, they tend to get sold diversionary snake oil solutions by influencers (e.g., "keep buying and deploying these devices, just set up a PiHole, and you'll totally be OK; like and subscribe"), while dystopian product movements march onward.
Hmm. What would you need consensus and immutability for?
Nonsensical.
Best to treat them all like hostile devices and limit what they can do to what you bought them to do.
guess they tuned out before the fridges inevitably get rooted and ended up as part of a botnet
Hmm... decisions...
How are they serving "contextual" ads without collecting/tracking anything?
I would NEVER buy one of their devices again. I've learned that they will punch you in the face every time, with deliberate choices made just out of spite (like pulse meter on smart watches, IIRC, only being available if you have a Samsung phone. Pixel phone is a no).
Connecting one of their TVs or fridges to the internet? Lol, not today, Satan. Not in this lifetime.
roscas•2h ago
In plain English now, Samgung will put advertising on your face but mostly important is that they will know and sell the data about what you buy.
They call it Smart Home. Yeah, "smart". They are the smart ones, not those who buy this **.
medbrane•2h ago
tormeh•2h ago
Edit: I checked because one shouldn't be outraged without fact checking. It's true.
lostlogin•2h ago
bradly•2h ago
j45•1h ago
heresie-dabord•2h ago
If you are not elevating the privacy of me and my family, CORPORATRON can suck it.
I will spend my money to elevate the sales of a company that respects privacy instead.
qmr•1h ago
Is there such a thing?
TheNewsIsHere•49m ago
Someone my spouse knows recently bought one of the $3500 models that’s getting this, and said person was in the “test” group for the rollout. Their response to the situation has been that they won’t buy Samsung appliances ever again.
So if enough of us do that. Maybe.
celeritascelery•2h ago
estimator7292•1h ago
oakesm9•1h ago
> As part of the Family Hub™ software update, we are piloting a new widget for select Cover screens themes of Family Hub™ refrigerators. The widget will display useful day-to-day information such as news, calendar and weather forecasts, along with curated advertisements
jbreckmckye•1h ago
FridayoLeary•43m ago
p_j_w•36m ago
mrandish•12m ago
qmr•1h ago