9 ms·

> In a follow-up post a day after his initial Tweet, Johnie noted “inaccuracy in the ASUS router tool.” Other LG smart washing machine users showed device data

> In a follow-up post a day after his initial Tweet, Johnie noted “inaccuracy in the ASUS router tool.” Other LG smart washing machine users showed device data use from their apps. It turns out that these appliances more typically use less than 1MB per day.

monkburger 3y ago
Ah! I should have read a little further. I apologize!
cratermoon 3y ago
A megabyte a day still seems excessive.
- dgrin91 3y ago
  If you agree to some form of anonymous tracking for diagnostics I can see 1mb being reasonable. This would be periodic update on things like usage levels, part quality, etc. Most likely that tracking acceptance is buried in some 500 page eula, but thats a separate issue.
  - solardev 3y ago
    Why do you need an entire megabyte for that? Even if you did laundry five times a day, it shouldn't take more than a few bytes to store a few metrics. Even if you're lazy and uploaded an uncompressed JSON array of objects, that shouldn't be more than a few kB. Way less if you compress it. A megabyte is a LOT of data.
    - crazygringo 3y ago
      I could easily see it measuring the forces and weight on the drum every 5 seconds (or even every 10 ms) during the whole wash, to be able to produce charts of vibration patterns, that engineers could use to correlate with failure. Remember -- when you're spinning at high speed to wring out the water, it's actually some pretty crazy strong forces. Or other things measured every ~second, like stuff related to the motor, temperatues, humidity, etc. and other diagnostics. Seems really easy to generate a megabyte if you consider time series. Even easier if it's in XML or JSON rather than a CSV.
      - solardev 3y ago
        You really think they're going to measure all that, upload it, send it to some expensive engineer, have them try to physically model the error, and then... what? That might make sense during development, but there's no way they do that in a consumer product. If a part breaks they're just going to send out a replacement or the repair guy is gonna get some third party part. Recording that much detail would just be noise. Even if they had specific parts sensors (doubt it, for costs), they could just process that locally and send up an error code, not the whole log. I find that all pretty hard to believe, but if anyone has evidence to the contrary, I'd be glad to be proven wrong. I had a LG washing machine bought new a few years ago promising all sorts of bells and whistles and app integrations. But it was super janky and cheaply made, the app integration was terrible, the on board memory would lose its configured settings, the entire LCD broke after a few weeks... it was not what I would consider well-engineered at all. If it was sending a megabyte a day I'd just assume it was yet another bug, not some forward thinking QA.
        deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
        refulgentis 3y ago
        I'm not really sure what you're asking: Is he sure they're sending < 1 MB a day? Yeah. Is he sure it's plausible it's measuring time series data? Yeah. Is it plausible they measure vibration patterns? Yeah. It's not about like "oh we'll send an electrical engineer to fix your specific vibration pattern", it's "we can collect data from the field to make forward-looking decisions": ex. maybe we switch supplier mix for replacement motors, and a data scientist ends up finding 6 months later that something changed in June 2023 where serviced washers in New York report dramatically more intense vibrations and now we know to go talk to the supplier who gained mix. It's error logs for non-tech. YMMV on individual team quality if they actually follow-up. Conceptually, Big Data(tm) is something CEOs have been hearing regularly since, what, 2014? So definitely plausible.
        tayo42 3y ago
        I would suspect they measure everything and use almost none of it. Like most web services. This was a common complaint and low hanging fruit optimization, that people were storing metrics that never got read. Just in case.
    - mortenjorck 3y ago
      > Even if you're lazy and uploaded an uncompressed JSON array of objects, that shouldn't be more than a few kB. See, that’s just one lazy engineer writing one telemetry solution. Multiply that by several engineers across several teams, each cobbling together a different telemetry solution for a different product manager’s initiative using a different stack of JavaScript libraries, throw in some poorly-rolled-out infrastructure changes a few years later resulting in some unanticipated retry loops, and I think you can hit that megabyte per day easily enough.
    - geodel 3y ago
      > A megabyte is a LOT of data. Well it is, but in this Cloud Native world the clueless management and IT engineers have been convinced that single micro service running on 50 kubernetes pods and generating 20 MB trace logs for single transaction is normal. Now once we have built this inefficiency industry wide nobody is there to wake the management up about huge wastage of resources. They are floating in this lurid dream of "ultra smart" machines generating gigabytes of precious intelligence about customer behavior for target ads
- jstummbillig 3y ago
  It seems completely inconsequential
  - Brian_K_White 3y ago
    It seems completely inexplicable. I don't care if it's a small percentage of my symmetric gigabit fiber, I only care why they supposedly need it and where it ends up. A phone number or a timestamp is a tiny amount of data. In the quaint olden days, you had to go out of your way to volunteer to be a part of some study to have any aspect of your activity recorded every few seconds 24/7 to be collected and analysed like that. It also doesn't matter that my washing machine usage might not seem like sensitive info. It's wrong by default rather than OK by default. You need a compelling need to justify it, not the other way around. It needs to be necessary to prevent one dead baby every day or something, not the other way around. No one needs to produce any convincing example of harm for that kind of collection to be wrong. But even so, it's easy to point out how literally any data can end up being sensitive. Washing machine usage could lead to all kinds of assumptions like, this person does not actually live where they say they do (which impacts all kinds of things), or this person is running an illegal business, or housing too many people for the rating of the dwelling or allowed by the lease, etc, or just another data point tracking your movements in general. Or even merely to get out of 10% of warranty claims.
    - Uvix 3y ago
      The users did go out of their way to volunteer, by hooking the washing machine up to their network.
      - Brian_K_White 3y ago
        They did not. They went out of their way to buy a washing machine and maybe use some monitoring or alerting feature it offers. I decline to believe you do not know this.
  - jwalton 3y ago
    War and Peace is 3mb as uncompressed plaintext[1]. 1mb a day is a lot. 1: https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/2600 https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/2600
- gberger 3y ago
  It's 12 bytes per second, or less than 1kB per minute. Doesn't seem like much.
  - poisonborz 3y ago
    For telemetry on a washing machine, it is enormous.
    - jethro_tell 3y ago
      That's WiFi/Bluetooth signal strength mapping amounts of data.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  - NikkiA 3y ago
    It's probably a single probe packet once a minute.
    - tim-- 3y ago
      Which is likely what is happening here. The LG "ThinQ" washing machines do allow for remote starts: https://github.com/ollo69/ha-smartthinq-sensors/issues/234 https://github.com/ollo69/ha-smartthinq-sensors/issues/234 > After 10 minutes (IIRC) in remote start mode without starting the machine goes to sleep. You must use the smartthinq_sensors.wake_up command to wake it up, then the remote_start command to start it.
  - Aeolun 3y ago
    It uploads a novel a day. That’s a lot!
- penneyd 3y ago
  Just checked mine which is used all the time and it's about 1.5mb per week.
ParetoOptimal 3y ago
Other users having low data usage doesn't prove they also have low usage? Are people so uncomfortable saying "we don't know" that they use such loose reasoning to "get the answer"? I'll re-read the article/tweets, maybe I missed something.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- Aurornis 3y ago
  > Other users having low data usage doesn't prove they also have low usage? The follow-up Tweet is from the same person who reported the initial issue. This happens a lot: Devices get a new IP address but some tool has an internal database that remembers the old device at that address. It then shows stats for the new device at that IP address but reports it as coming from whatever it was initially recognized as.
- Kranar 3y ago
  Why are you ignoring that the person who made the original claim about 3.7 GB of data per day stated that it could be an accuracy issue with his router?
yakz 3y ago
My Ubiquiti UniFi UDM is not good at device identification. It's kind of annoying because I have this big list of devices on the network and it's peppered with devices that I know don't exist. I'd appreciate it if it said something like "Maybe iPad Air", instead of just "iPad Pro 2nd Gen" when I know no such device is on my network.
- Gyrantula2 3y ago
  Occasionally it's fun to discover new devices. "It thinks my WiFi dog feeder is a Technoelectrocom 56XR-2000? What the hell is (was) that?"
  - paradox460 3y ago
    I found out that unifi plug in doorbell chimes use an esp32 this way because I saw one on my devices table, before it had booted fully and handshook as it's real Identity
    - Gyrantula2 3y ago
      Do you mean the non-PoE version? I have the PoE version sitting in a box somewhere and I'm a ESP32 enthusiast so I'm wondering if that's what I'll be doing today. Surely they're using it just as a WiFi coprocessor? Or...?
      - paradox460 3y ago
        The non PoE one, the one that just plugs into a normal power outlet My PoE one has only ever identified as what Ubiquiti thinks it is, so no idea
- Saris 3y ago
  Most personal devices now use randomized MACs so it's hard to ID them. You can go via IP though, pull up your DHCP lease on your phone/laptop/whatever and match it to the same IP in Unifi, then manually name the device.
- 3y ago
Johnie 3y ago
Note: that was inaccurately reported in the TomsHardware article The fact that it shows up as using iMessage is the part that I said may be inaccurately reported. Even now, I am still seeing some suspicious data usage. I’ve started wiresharking it yesterday to track it down.

monkburger 3y ago

Ah! I should have read a little further. I apologize!

cratermoon 3y ago

A megabyte a day still seems excessive.

dgrin91 3y ago
If you agree to some form of anonymous tracking for diagnostics I can see 1mb being reasonable. This would be periodic update on things like usage levels, part quality, etc. Most likely that tracking acceptance is buried in some 500 page eula, but thats a separate issue.
- solardev 3y ago
  Why do you need an entire megabyte for that? Even if you did laundry five times a day, it shouldn't take more than a few bytes to store a few metrics. Even if you're lazy and uploaded an uncompressed JSON array of objects, that shouldn't be more than a few kB. Way less if you compress it. A megabyte is a LOT of data.
  - crazygringo 3y ago
    I could easily see it measuring the forces and weight on the drum every 5 seconds (or even every 10 ms) during the whole wash, to be able to produce charts of vibration patterns, that engineers could use to correlate with failure. Remember -- when you're spinning at high speed to wring out the water, it's actually some pretty crazy strong forces. Or other things measured every ~second, like stuff related to the motor, temperatues, humidity, etc. and other diagnostics. Seems really easy to generate a megabyte if you consider time series. Even easier if it's in XML or JSON rather than a CSV.
    - solardev 3y ago
      You really think they're going to measure all that, upload it, send it to some expensive engineer, have them try to physically model the error, and then... what? That might make sense during development, but there's no way they do that in a consumer product. If a part breaks they're just going to send out a replacement or the repair guy is gonna get some third party part. Recording that much detail would just be noise. Even if they had specific parts sensors (doubt it, for costs), they could just process that locally and send up an error code, not the whole log. I find that all pretty hard to believe, but if anyone has evidence to the contrary, I'd be glad to be proven wrong. I had a LG washing machine bought new a few years ago promising all sorts of bells and whistles and app integrations. But it was super janky and cheaply made, the app integration was terrible, the on board memory would lose its configured settings, the entire LCD broke after a few weeks... it was not what I would consider well-engineered at all. If it was sending a megabyte a day I'd just assume it was yet another bug, not some forward thinking QA.
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      - refulgentis 3y ago
        I'm not really sure what you're asking: Is he sure they're sending < 1 MB a day? Yeah. Is he sure it's plausible it's measuring time series data? Yeah. Is it plausible they measure vibration patterns? Yeah. It's not about like "oh we'll send an electrical engineer to fix your specific vibration pattern", it's "we can collect data from the field to make forward-looking decisions": ex. maybe we switch supplier mix for replacement motors, and a data scientist ends up finding 6 months later that something changed in June 2023 where serviced washers in New York report dramatically more intense vibrations and now we know to go talk to the supplier who gained mix. It's error logs for non-tech. YMMV on individual team quality if they actually follow-up. Conceptually, Big Data(tm) is something CEOs have been hearing regularly since, what, 2014? So definitely plausible.
      - tayo42 3y ago
        I would suspect they measure everything and use almost none of it. Like most web services. This was a common complaint and low hanging fruit optimization, that people were storing metrics that never got read. Just in case.
  - mortenjorck 3y ago
    > Even if you're lazy and uploaded an uncompressed JSON array of objects, that shouldn't be more than a few kB. See, that’s just one lazy engineer writing one telemetry solution. Multiply that by several engineers across several teams, each cobbling together a different telemetry solution for a different product manager’s initiative using a different stack of JavaScript libraries, throw in some poorly-rolled-out infrastructure changes a few years later resulting in some unanticipated retry loops, and I think you can hit that megabyte per day easily enough.
  - geodel 3y ago
    > A megabyte is a LOT of data. Well it is, but in this Cloud Native world the clueless management and IT engineers have been convinced that single micro service running on 50 kubernetes pods and generating 20 MB trace logs for single transaction is normal. Now once we have built this inefficiency industry wide nobody is there to wake the management up about huge wastage of resources. They are floating in this lurid dream of "ultra smart" machines generating gigabytes of precious intelligence about customer behavior for target ads
jstummbillig 3y ago
It seems completely inconsequential
- Brian_K_White 3y ago
  It seems completely inexplicable. I don't care if it's a small percentage of my symmetric gigabit fiber, I only care why they supposedly need it and where it ends up. A phone number or a timestamp is a tiny amount of data. In the quaint olden days, you had to go out of your way to volunteer to be a part of some study to have any aspect of your activity recorded every few seconds 24/7 to be collected and analysed like that. It also doesn't matter that my washing machine usage might not seem like sensitive info. It's wrong by default rather than OK by default. You need a compelling need to justify it, not the other way around. It needs to be necessary to prevent one dead baby every day or something, not the other way around. No one needs to produce any convincing example of harm for that kind of collection to be wrong. But even so, it's easy to point out how literally any data can end up being sensitive. Washing machine usage could lead to all kinds of assumptions like, this person does not actually live where they say they do (which impacts all kinds of things), or this person is running an illegal business, or housing too many people for the rating of the dwelling or allowed by the lease, etc, or just another data point tracking your movements in general. Or even merely to get out of 10% of warranty claims.
  - Uvix 3y ago
    The users did go out of their way to volunteer, by hooking the washing machine up to their network.
    - Brian_K_White 3y ago
      They did not. They went out of their way to buy a washing machine and maybe use some monitoring or alerting feature it offers. I decline to believe you do not know this.
- jwalton 3y ago
  War and Peace is 3mb as uncompressed plaintext[1]. 1mb a day is a lot. 1: https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/2600 https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/2600
gberger 3y ago
It's 12 bytes per second, or less than 1kB per minute. Doesn't seem like much.
- poisonborz 3y ago
  For telemetry on a washing machine, it is enormous.
  - jethro_tell 3y ago
    That's WiFi/Bluetooth signal strength mapping amounts of data.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- NikkiA 3y ago
  It's probably a single probe packet once a minute.
  - tim-- 3y ago
    Which is likely what is happening here. The LG "ThinQ" washing machines do allow for remote starts: https://github.com/ollo69/ha-smartthinq-sensors/issues/234 https://github.com/ollo69/ha-smartthinq-sensors/issues/234 > After 10 minutes (IIRC) in remote start mode without starting the machine goes to sleep. You must use the smartthinq_sensors.wake_up command to wake it up, then the remote_start command to start it.
- Aeolun 3y ago
  It uploads a novel a day. That’s a lot!
penneyd 3y ago
Just checked mine which is used all the time and it's about 1.5mb per week.

ParetoOptimal 3y ago

Other users having low data usage doesn't prove they also have low usage? Are people so uncomfortable saying "we don't know" that they use such loose reasoning to "get the answer"? I'll re-read the article/tweets, maybe I missed something.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
Aurornis 3y ago
> Other users having low data usage doesn't prove they also have low usage? The follow-up Tweet is from the same person who reported the initial issue. This happens a lot: Devices get a new IP address but some tool has an internal database that remembers the old device at that address. It then shows stats for the new device at that IP address but reports it as coming from whatever it was initially recognized as.
Kranar 3y ago
Why are you ignoring that the person who made the original claim about 3.7 GB of data per day stated that it could be an accuracy issue with his router?

yakz 3y ago

My Ubiquiti UniFi UDM is not good at device identification. It's kind of annoying because I have this big list of devices on the network and it's peppered with devices that I know don't exist. I'd appreciate it if it said something like "Maybe iPad Air", instead of just "iPad Pro 2nd Gen" when I know no such device is on my network.

Gyrantula2 3y ago
Occasionally it's fun to discover new devices. "It thinks my WiFi dog feeder is a Technoelectrocom 56XR-2000? What the hell is (was) that?"
- paradox460 3y ago
  I found out that unifi plug in doorbell chimes use an esp32 this way because I saw one on my devices table, before it had booted fully and handshook as it's real Identity
  - Gyrantula2 3y ago
    Do you mean the non-PoE version? I have the PoE version sitting in a box somewhere and I'm a ESP32 enthusiast so I'm wondering if that's what I'll be doing today. Surely they're using it just as a WiFi coprocessor? Or...?
    - paradox460 3y ago
      The non PoE one, the one that just plugs into a normal power outlet My PoE one has only ever identified as what Ubiquiti thinks it is, so no idea
Saris 3y ago
Most personal devices now use randomized MACs so it's hard to ID them. You can go via IP though, pull up your DHCP lease on your phone/laptop/whatever and match it to the same IP in Unifi, then manually name the device.
3y ago

Johnie 3y ago

Note: that was inaccurately reported in the TomsHardware article The fact that it shows up as using iMessage is the part that I said may be inaccurately reported. Even now, I am still seeing some suspicious data usage. I’ve started wiresharking it yesterday to track it down.