Nice write-up by Jeff.
Things are getting out of hand. It’s time for a change. Only buy equipment with local access.
Things like these are getting ridiculous and the most unreasonable of it all is that most people do not consider this as predatory and invasive behaviour from manufacturers.
I like my appliances dumb. Don’t try to sell me a smart TV, a smart fridge or a smart anything. It does not need to connect to the internet. It needs to do one specific task and one only. I don’t need my fridge to order groceries.
exactly, OP shouldn’t have bought it to begin with.
It’s a common occurence. People should know by now.I couldn’t agree more with your stand about the need for devices to be smart.
It is all about data-mining and advertising.
Maybe this is just me (or wishful thinking), but I do notice more people being cautious about stuff that needs a cloud connection.
People around me create dummy accounts to register Android enabled televisions, prefer stuff by eufy over ring etc.
Maybe we -as a bunch of uncontrollable nerds- should educate people more or at least share stuff like the wiki by Louis.
People need to know, they are the product…
I can’t say the same thing, sadly.
People around me get easily fascinated by convinience over security and privacy. Biometric phone unlocking, work-only-through-app accessories, smart tvs, connected refrigerators, kitchen robots and expresso machines, autonomous vaccuum cleaners or web enabled water heaters and ACs… convenience rules absolute.
I enjoy going to stores and have sales people throw their pitch at me. The look on their face is priceless as all the convenience functions don’t ring any appeal to me; nothing against them, they are doing their job, but still.
I hope we can force change and push back on the ever growing invasive tactics of companies and markets.
I hate how they don’t mention connectivity anymore when buying shit. None of the reviews mention this either that the app has tracking and that you have to pay for stuff. If they do mention it, it’s barely a brief mention of it, and nothing more. I got my van in 2023 and it needs an app but luckily Toyota gives me an option to turn all that shit off so now I have a dumb van supposedly. And I fucking hate vehicles with Wi-Fi. Why the fuck does my vehicle need Wi-Fi? My phone has Wi-Fi.
LG pulls some of this BS too. When I tried it a few years ago, the LG app required always-on precise location permission to function at all. The smart features on my washer and refrigerator also require them to always be connected to the Internet but those features were more limited that what Jeff describes. I was willing to allow the appliances Internet access from an isolated subnet, but there is no way I’m going to allow LG access to all of my phone’s location data just so I can run their crappy, barely functional app.
In Mexico Bosch is even more customer hostile. My Bosch water heater had to be replaced because Bosch discontinued the repair parts needed to fix it. It’s only 3 years old.
I actually really like my Bosch dishwasher + home connect. You can hook it up with home assistant, and use that to run the dishwasher when solar is working.
Local access would be nice, but homeconnect isnt that bad, and has been improving.
The point here is:
- not all functionality is available as-is. You need to install a cloud connected app.
- a cloud connection is not per se one direction. It is more than possible, the people operating this cloud (for Bosch) have the means (read: api) to connect back into your network via the hardware.
You might take a good look at this work.
As long as the firmware of the dishwasher isn’t audited by third parties (or even better: open source), who knows what it is able to do in your network?
And all of this is not necessary, before the cloud, dishwashers worked fine too.
Dishwashers worked fine as electromechanical devices too. This is all fucking nuts. Mine blew up recently (electromechanical and probably 30 at this point) and I’ll be replacing it with one a family member no longer needs. When it gives up the ghost and if I’ve cleared some garage space by then, I’m minded to take it apart and see how hard it is to reverse engineer the damn thing.
@BeardedGingerWonder @BOFH666 always worth googling around for the Service Manual rather than User Manual for those things. And YouTube. Probably find the correct order in which to take it apart without too many curses.
I don’t think we should let vendors get away with this stuff.
Yes returning it is a huge hassle. But if you’re not returning it you still bought their product, supported them financially and that product line. Even if they see you not activating cloud features in numbers, others do and they can make very favorable calculations.
The single most effective way to not let them get away with it is returning it. As an unacceptable product.
Yup, all his top video comments said this shortly after video release. Personally, I always check for this stuff pre-purchase, but if I ran into it now, I would return unless I specifically bought it to self-host and block internet, which you can do with Bosch, but I wouldn’t, because for a dishwasher that’s dumb.
I moved to a new place and it came with one of these.
Besides the inconvenience of essentially paywalling features, it fucking GUZZLES rinse aid and send you notifications about needing more, and it doesn’t rinse it all the way off meaning my dishes need rinsing before drinking out of a glass for example.
Fuck Bosch and fuck Consumer Reports. What an absolute ingot of microplastic pollution someone rammed into my kitchen
