Samsung makes ads on smart fridges official with upcoming software update
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
Sadly, I'm including their TVs in this. I have one today, displaying the output of an Apple TV and not directly connected to the Internet because hah, no way, but I'll be shopping around when it comes time to replace it.
Pity. They make nice stuff. Not nice enough that I'm willing to tolerate their anti-customer shenanigans, but otherwise decent quality.
However, when you see the viral videos of "dream fridges" from the 1950s, it's important to remember that adjusted for inflation they would be something like $10k today. Of course they also last 10x as long, but you can still find fridges in that price range today with a similar value proposition. The question is whether or not you're willing to pay that upfront. I think we've all been so conditioned to accept that appliances go obsolete that it doesn't seem possible for a fridge like that to ever pay for itself.
It's the boots theory at work.
The rich person buys a $3500 pair of boots that comes with surveillance, useless AI, and bricks itself on the next firmware update.
The poor person buys a pair of boots, that are... boots.
Manufacturers which are aiming at being dirt cheap and selling lots of products, have low margins and simply cannot afford too many replacements / warranty repairs. High margin products don't care, they could make you three in that price and still be ok.
The "luxury" appliances can be double that and are still shit.
Ready example is my aunt: a very good and expensive Miele washing machine, that was made to last as things were before. But now 10 years have elapsed and modern washers come with bigger drums, much lower noises, optimized water and electricity usages, and more effective washing patterns.
But she's stuck with her old and trusty one, because she feels that it's working "like new". And she's not wrong, it works well, so it became a sort of a "golden cuff" so to speak (not knowing any better metaphor). So good and expensive, that now getting rid of it for a new one feels like a waste of money for not much gain.
Does anyone have examples of consumer fridges like this?
Eh, I've got a very reasonably priced Haier fridge that I've had no issues with at all. Maybe I'm just lucky, and it definitely helps that there's no built in ice maker or water dispenser (those things seem to break first) but it's lived longer than the refrigerators that the rest of my family have.
What kind of monkey designs something like that. It's obsolescence by design.
I will never buy another Samsung product.
Our Samsung fridge’s manual says it’ll automatically and silently mesh network with any Samsung TVs in range, use AI and hidden cameras to recognize what’s in the fridge and when we use it, then have the TV inject targeted ads into programming based on its findings.
We’ll never purchase another Samsung product.
Otherwise I might have considered them but steered well clear, and am very happy with the decision a decade later. Went Bosch for the washer and Electrolux for the fridge, had zero issues.
Also, I'm wondering if any other manufacturer would make the crank and the drum from the same material. Wouldn't it be like $100 extra to make a stainless steel spider?
But why is that? HN told me that ads were just reserved for people who refused to “pay for the product”. By inference we must conclude that for-pay products shall not have ads on sheer principle. Where’s that smug scolding at now?
Not cheap either!
[^1]: https://pfy.ch/programming/disable-samsung-game-bar.html
I was fiercely loyal to them for a lot of years after that experience.
Unfortunately all of my relatives love their phones.
I've been replacing with mid-range LG on advice of the local repair company and been happy so far. Quirky and very few features but seems well built.
Can't wait to replace the massive refrigerator and swap the gas range for inductive. Fridge is slowly going (cracked and leaking ice maker, condensation problem with deli drawer).
I now know how my mom could justify the ridiculous expense of a Subzero refrigerator (around $6k back in 2000). That thing has only needed a couple of tune ups and no parts replacements in 20 years.
The speed queen washer that came with the house failed. The 30 year old lid switch literally fell apart. $10 on amazon next day. Took me 10 minutes and youtube to take the machine apart. It's meant to be serviced and I'm handy. I don't get engineers who won't try and fix their appliances. It's like a free weekend day entertainment for me.
What is the advantage of an inductive stove? Will they even work in the US? I think in Europe they work with 360 V if I remember right.
I realized two things:
1. You can cook nearly everything with a ricecooker. Just throw everything inside. Yes, even the minced meat on top.
2. An airfrier is better and faster than a shitty oven.
I'm not a fan of vendor lock in, but their decision to retroactively remove functionality that I was depending on led me to never buy another Samsung product since.
I control what devices in my house connect to the internet.
That’s certainly admirable, but haven’t tv manufacturers beeen caught connecting to ANY WiFi they find, if it’s open? Amongst other various dark patterns?
Your statement here kind of characterizes it as user error, but the manufacturers are absolutely hostile actors here.
> When showing that the user has switched to HDMI input, show the full screen information: "HDMI1, brought to you by _____ [insert advertiser here]. Best experienced with Monster HDMI cables. Gold plated for the digital clarity."
(Sorry, I just had to. In fact, thoug, I would be furious if my tv injected ads onto my source material)
[1] https://github.com/home-assistant/core/issues/133623#issueco...
Hopefully you don't have a neighbor like me. I keep an open wifi channel. So far the only customer has been the neighbors samsung tv phoning home. I felt bad about that and blocked it. But wow are they aggressive trying to get that telemetry out.
Do they? I've never owned a Samsung phone, in large part because I was always turned off by reports that they liked to skin Android in annoying/lame ways. I have a Samsung fridge/freezer (old and not-smart), but the in-door ice maker has a design flaw that causes condensation to drip, freeze, and clog it, so we've given up on it and just make our own ice with regular old-school trays in the freezer.
I'm not going to say they make crap, but their stuff is... okay, I guess.
It was hackable, rootable, and it ran aftermarket ROMs like a dream.
It was the Galaxy S5, and it was released just over a decade ago.
Things have been headed downhill ever since.
I saw someone else’s Samsung TV with ads on the input select menu…
That was enough to pre-ban myself from any future Samsung appliance.
https://ncph.org/history-at-work/rethinking-the-refrigerator...
Anything sold as "GE" is just re-badged somebody else's crap, mostly Haier.
Of course I am no longer inclined to purchase Samsung products based on this new info. I honestly think that if a company pushes an update that makes its product worse, they should be obligated to refund you 100% of the original purchase price.
It's Google TV, and I don't mind ads for content on the home screen. I use a bunch of streaming services, I might want to watch whatever's up there, that's not entirely incongruous. Then about a year after purchase we started getting ads for L'Oreal shampoo and other products. Nope.
Sony acted confused when I sent a support ticket, and eventually said "Oh, that's because it's Google TV, nothing we can do about it". I replied saying perhaps they had given too much control over their tv experience to a third party. I was able to activate "App Only Mode" to make them go away, but you lose a bunch of the features and have to disable it to get to the play store if you want to install anything else.
Pisses me off. I paid a couple of thousand dollars (AUD) for that tv, I shouldn't have advertising shoved in my face.
That's how I do it as well, and I hate that dumb TVs are getting increasingly more rare.
I know the day is coming where any new "Smart" TV will mandate you connect it to the internet to go through some initial setup process or require regular phone homes to function, and I'm not looking forward to it.
I don't want my TV to do anything except display whatever I have connected to it. It's job stops there.
I've heard that Netflix has added HDR10+ streams recently, but I haven't verified that myself.
Our cheaper LG works beautifully with the same inputs. The Samsung? Nope. Everything looks like the finale of Game of Thrones, even when you're looking at a soccer game played on a sunny day at noon on the equator.
I just don't see the problem, and don't see how connecting a different box to watch the same things is much better than just using the OS to do that. If they did have ads on it that would definitely be a problem though.
Imagine you're using a brand new maxed-out MacBook Pro, and someone hands you a 2013 HP laptop. The HP is... fine. It displays web pages, lets you load a word processor, and otherwise looks and acts like a laptop. If you hadn't ever used another computer, you probably wouldn't think anything of it.
BTW, I bet a Fire TV or various other options would be fine, too. I just don't have the personal experience to vouch for those. I'm not using this anecdote to shill Apple TV specifically, just to say that there are much better options than the built-in apps.
Because then you can replace a $50-100 box when it starts misbehaving (e.g. tracking and selling your information) or not getting upgrades anymore or getting slower, rather than replacing a $1000 TV.
If you upgrade your TV on the regular I guess you'd just buy a new one, but treating it as a dumb display guarantees you can keep using it as long as it physically works.
> "Well, sure, but not in our dreams. Only on TV and radio, and in magazines, and movies, and at ball games, and on buses, and milk cartons, and T-shirts, and bananas, and written on the sky... But not in dreams."
(I've used em-dashes since before LLMs and I'm not fucking stopping now)
EDIT: s,',,
https://bounties.fulu.org/bounties/samsung-familyhub-refrige...
Good luck for anyone to claim this bounty if that's one of the requirements. Does the fridge have any exposed ports at all that the average person could access without removing anything from the fridge?
It's also not clear in the bounty, if I add funds to the campaign and it gets fully funded, does that mean that software/hack will be released publicly? Or only to "backers"? It's not clear what the donation goes to, besides for the person who makes the hack to claim.
FULU / Rossmann isn't handling the public release ... at all. They're worried that doing so would violate US law or at least cost a lot in court fees. They'd be super stoked if whoever made it released to to the public and absolutely not just to "backers".
While the fulu.org domain has been around for a long time, archive.org's oldest snapshot of bounties.fulu.org is from late last week.
This press release from Oct. 23rd agrees with archive.org's snapshot history: <https://fulu-foundation.ghost.io/repair-bounty-program/>.
Given the complexity of the tasks on offer, I'm unsurprised that zero of them have been completed in three days. Give those boffins some time, yeah?
I pay for Spotify and the app now shows paid suggestions (cough ads), to paying users. When you tap the ellipsis and choose "Not interested", it doesn't respond with "OK, we'll stop" but something like 'We'll show less of this'.
No, don't show less, I want you to not show it at all.
But I fear all such services will eventually succumb to this, given just how much more lucrative ads can be compared to subscriptions.
Might seem funny for some more senior readers, but as somebody who almost exclusively only listened to music through MP3s and streaming, I found the included artwork and other goodies in vinyl / CDs to be incredible. Who would have known that my favorite albums often had not just album covers, but lyrics sheets and entire booklets filled with interesting trivia and additional artwork?
I will say that they’re typically concerts related to the channel I am on, but there is no world in which I want to attend live music, and of course there’s no way to tell them that. so I have to tolerate getting interrupted periodically despite already paying them.
Unfortunately, the entire industry is racing toward this behavior. Recent LGs have also started slapping “AI” stickers on their products. I’ve been visiting Rossman’s Consumer Wiki[1] more often than I’d like before making a purchase.
(This was after direct exposure to their Tizen engineering team back in the early 2000s)
I stayed away from their phones, SmartTVs, everything.
https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/samsung-smart-tvs...
[1] https://www.consumerreports.org/electronics/privacy/how-to-t...
I used to have the watch, and was interested enough in the OS to work toward making personal apps for it.
What alternative phone manufacturer would you recommend as well, if you don't mind.
It's okay to say no. After decades of being the computer tech in my family, I started saying no and have been a lot happier for it.
My cellphone decided to die last month. It was near retirement, but still working until it didn't. I bought a Samsung phone. First it asked twice if I wanted to share all my life with Google (using some dark patterns) and then it asked twice if I wanted to share all my life with Samsung (using more dark patterns). (After that, I installed WhatsApp, so I'm not sure I bothered.)
Next the phone offered to install the app from my carrier, TikTok and a ¿third? app-store. I didn't want them so in the screen with the offer I disabled the first and the other two were disabled by default. Anyway, I got TikTok and the other app for some reason! (I uninstalled them inmediately.)
I still get random notifications, like complaining that I'm using the phone too much. Or a notification that they upgraded something, restarted the phone and all apps notifications were disabled until I unlock it. (Lucky, I didn't miss any important urgent message.)
Not to mention a new notification to accept the new Samsung terms and conditions every two weeks.
I wouldn't call a "$1,899 to $3,499" fridge cheap.
* a product manager decides to include ads in some digital product. Their analytics show plenty of "engagement". The engagement is actually people accidentally clicking on the ad while hunting for the tiny "close" button, but even if the PM suspects it, they have no reason to volunteer that information. They keep getting their salary paid and even earn a promotion based on the engagement numbers.
* the developers are tasked with implementing the advertising infrastructure - they get paid while padding their resume about how they're building "scalable" systems.
* the "scalable" system runs on a cloud provider and earns them a ton of money. Cloud provider is happy.
* some marketing agency is given a budget to go and spend on ads. The person there maybe even knows that advertising in the aforementioned product is a bad idea because most of their clicks are fake... but if their client is tasking them with burning money, why would they refuse?
* a marketing person at a big company that doesn't actually need any more advertising to succeed is given a budget and spreads it across a few marketing agencies including the aforementioned one. They get paid, why should they refuse?
At every layer (and I haven't even listed them all), people get paid by skimming something off the top. It doesn't matter whether the advertising works, because nobody in the chain has any incentive to admit it while the status quo is so lucrative, so the rational thing to do for everyone is to not rock the boat.
By a percentage every year.
Compounding.
This was always an obvious outcome.
What the outcome actually happening is indicative of however is that consumers are very very very bad at their job (consuming the best products) and do not have enough rights.
If a customer was entitled to a working product without this kind of deficiency, and we had courts that actually applied punishments to large corporations (instead of unilaterally and without justification, significantly reducing fines to nothing) we wouldn't have this problem. It wouldn't be possible to profit off of this kind of advertising because you would be too busy signing court documents about how you suck at building stuff.
There's only so many human beings who can buy your fridge. There's only so cheap you can build your fridge. There's only so much you can charge for your fridge. But line must go up.
This is simply what it looks like when the people with money and resources decide that a stable and reliable profit is a Failed business.
If it was legal to kill for money they would do that too. In some ways that already occurs.
If your next question is "why do they need to keep making more money?", the answer is capitalism.
There's no way that this was ever /not/ going to happen under current laws (US).
Attention is the ultimate resource.
An executive can point to a profit stream and suggest that’s beneficial to the company while ignoring externalities that cost the company 5x as much. Nobody inside has complete knowledge if someone was a good idea or not so the appearance of benefit often replaces the search for actual benefit.
The execs will receive their bonuses in two years and then move to the next company to grift again, and again, until they retire.
AI is going the same way.
In the end it’s always going to be ads. Is just sad.
HN loves them as the majority work or want to work for advertising firms.
I don't want a fridge with a screen or any connections except power. All it needs to do is keep my food cold. I've had others very surprised to see my house containing mostly mid-century dumb appliances. I deal with enough problems caused by software at work, to know better than to bring that hassle home.
Having followed the instructions to do it, it's much nicer having beautiful background images (rather than ads for crappy TV shows and movies) and a cleaner interface with at least one less click required to get to the apps I want (ie. a better UX).
TCL TVs are not a particularly premium product, so I'm not too annoyed about having to go this little bit of effort to make it nicer. However, a $3,500 fridge seems like a premium-ish price, and so to also have ads on that feels incredibly tacky to the point it cheapens the product and the brand overall.
* number of adults in the house hold (people who have access to the account)
* when you are home
* opening fridge/doing laundry/etc. I have no idea if their app has an excuse to ask for location- but app location tracking would be the most valuable data
* even if you don’t share location- these things are on your network and any regular and simple network scanning would show when certain devices are home and we they are not home and what schedules they follow
This isn’t even very imaginative, just the basics really. I would not be surprised if you could guess the household size solely based on the number of times a fridge is opened in a day. You could at least determine between a person without a family vs. family- that’s useful for ads. Are these the fridges that have cameras in them ‘so you can see what you have while at the grocery store’? Throw some image detection in there and you now know brand targeting and if they cook regularly or eat out. A goldmine of data really.
But that was a hard no for me. I just left all of that alone - we have a ISP set-top box that comes with FTTH tv and few services so I don't need to log in anywhere else.
Mother has a hearing aid and she wanted to try Bluetooth connection - devices paired without mobile app but she couldn't lower volume down on tv nor on her device, even with aid's own app.
It still wasn't as bad as expected. I read some of the experiences people had where they couldn't even get into the home screen of tv before agreeing for network connection or login to some cloud services.
Fiends got some 4k Samsung for their new house - it comes with some AI features because of course it does. They said that they couldn't easily find picture controls and every show was automatically adjusted on brightness, saturation etc., making anything pain to watch.
They also got washing machine/dryer combo from Samsung as well - weeks after someone posted on our discord server video from Polish store where bunch of guys "hacked" similar smart-enabled machine and launched... youtube with that dancing "6 grams" cow clip. What a time to be alive.
Why would I pay $2000 more for a more annoying fridge?
"The ads experience, though, seems to have improved somewhat from the earlier pilot testing in that users can use their fridge’s settings menu to opt out of seeing ads. If users set their Cover Screen to show integrated Art or Album themes, then the display won’t show ads."
So at least for now tech savvy, aware users can opt out. But I don't like where this is going.
Maybe we can tape cardboard over the screens?
What is a contextualized ad?
This is distinct from demographic (trends based on physical attributes, like age) or geographic or behavioral (your buying patterns) and they already know the device targeting because it's their fridge.
Classic digital advertising vectors.
I know, I know, I suffer daily from government overreach ;) But have you tried lobbying for your fellow humans?
Using a service is an ongoing relationship, and relationships change over time, sometimes for the worse. This needs to be factored in as risk, every time someone makes a purchase that includes a service.
Smart is the consumer that is able to spot all this BS ideas that are putting in front of us and avoids it as much as it can.
The real problem is, there's not much on the market that respects the consumers in this regard. Ask for an SLA on a smart fridge functionality and you'll be met with a confusion and possibly a revelation there's nothing of a kind.
It's all ignored because most consumers don't ask questions about reliability, functionality, security and control - they don't think of those. And it's not a matter of technical or specialized knowledge, I'm sure even a caveman can understand "will this work tomorrow the exact same way it works today?" or "what happens to my fridge if you go out of business?" - it's a matter of awareness. People simply don't know yet how those new things can fail them.
Eventually people will learn about the issues, and start asking maker companies those questions. But it's all too new today.
Let me guess: now to operate a dishwasher I need to download and install a mobile app. And also regularly update the app and the firmware of the appliance, or maybe need a permanent internet connection to correctly operate. It' BS all the way down.
The only thing that companies are expecting from providing you a smart feature is to somehow monetize that on a regular basis and the easiest thing to do that is to either sell your data or locking you down to a fucking subscription.
We have a frame TV also and it worked nice for the very narrow use case we had.
OT - This reminds me of the digital billboards on the highway that change before one has the chance to understand what it's advertising. I don't even have the chance to count the seconds before the ad changes much less see what it's advertising.
The level of absurdity here with respect to "miss[ing] out on other features" strains credulity.
I don't know why I would connect a fridge to the Internet at all. Maybe there is a use case where you can get a picture of the contents of your fridge on your phone when you are out and about? Like you're at the grocery store and can't remember if you need to pick up milk or not?
Is this a feature? It seems like making more parts to break.
Surely there's a better way to get independent cooling control. E.g. one compressor with valves to control which side(s) the coolant flows to?
I had to go to contortions with a tv from Samsung, but did manage to force all port 53 traffic to go via Pihole.
I believe this method may have been broken by Samsung/Google et al somehow though?
- fridges - toasters - TVs - home appliances - what-have-you
Whoever makes those, take my $€£¥
For everything else, there are crappier alternatives from all the consumer electronics OEMs
Notifications and Alerts: If the door is left open, or the fridge temperature is leaving safe temps, or the water filter needs changing, it can send a push notification to your phone. (Useful if something fails; or if a kid/guest leaves the fridge open by mistake).
Remote control and monitoring: You can use the camera to see the contents of the fridge. You can also adjust the temperature remotely. (Useful if you're at the grocery store and can't remember if you have milk?) It looks like they also have "AI" try to categorize these for you.
Built-in tablet: The touchscreen is basically a builtin tablet. You can use it to display photos (pulled from your online albums), show the weather, or control "smart home" stuff like playing some music on your speakers. I imagine you could also try to put recipes or cooking videos on there. You can also easily order groceries from it or add to your shopping list (with your voice).
I'd rather have a separate device for most of this, but I can understand the appeal, especially if you're not privacy-conscious.
That's probably because you're a developer, and as developers it's really easy for us to develop tunnel-vision for some reason, and really hard to see the perspective from a "regular person", the sort of person who a salesperson can say "You can now get alerted when you're low on eggs, no matter where you are!" and the person will think that's a cool feature with no drawbacks.
It has everything to do with being frugal and whether you see the utility. There is very little benefit in being alerted when I am low on eggs because I can simply open the fridge and look. I can also normally buy eggs anywhere, at any time of day.
There isn't really a problem that needs solving.
Soon though they won't ask, LTE-M / NB-IoT, both chips and plans are becoming very cheap and unless you are living in a faraday cage it will take control away from the user completely.
Silicon Valley parodied smart fridges nearly a decade ago.
Guessing anything without screen is reasonably safe
You won’t be able to. It will be mandatory. They will do it. If you give these companies an inch, they’ll take a mile.
The moment they don’t actively work entirely aligned with your interests, they work against you.
I know it's a trope, but this is the absolute textbook definition of enshittification.
"No, Samsung fridges do not run on webOS; they use Samsung's own Tizen operating system. LG is the brand that uses webOS in its smart refrigerators. "
If you feel so inclined to have a touch screen on your fridge then you'd be better off getting some random tablet and sticking it to the fridge.
I _love_ my home automation/smart house devices but I wouldn't touch one of these with a 10ft pole.
* That might be a bit high
I like to think in future there migh be Harry Tuttle like appliance repair vigilantes that come out and remove all this crap from home appliances. :-)
Have you ever heard Samsung washing machine doing Franz Schubert's The Trout at the end of cycle? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9TpRsLdKVAg
https://www.samsung.com/us/home-appliances/refrigerators/bes...
Maybe the people complaining are the ones whose employers don't even sell out people with third-party trackers on their Web site. But I see more than 3 people complaining.
But, let's consider the counterfactual. What if Samsung offered you a new fridge for free, as long as you were ok with passive ads?
I hate ads, but I'm not sure I would pass up a free fridge...those things are expensive!
(this is not even that unrealistic. Let's say you have a household of 3 and a fridge lasts 10 years. Meta makes about $200 per year per user solely from showing ads; that's $6000 over 10 years. If Samsung got as good as Meta is (which they likely won't), 6k is more than enough to cover the cost of giving a fridge away for free)
Did we get free TVs, free cars and free phones?
I'd still buy a normal fridge from a different vendor. There's absolutely no reason why fridge needs a display screen nor any "smart" features. And no ad deal would convince me because next thing that would come after this would be the obvious "watch ads to unlock the fridge".
Household appliances are meant to work for years - sure, now lifespan is way shorter than used to be but these aren't phones we're replacing every 3 years or so. The fridge we once had lasted 25 up until cooling unit failed and there was no way to replace it or fix.
I hope you rolled some really low bait here because if you really think like that then... I sincerely feel sorry for you.
Samsung appliances - never again.
PS. Repairman told me that Samsung have fixed already one of the problems my fridge has by the time he looked at it, kind of hidden recall and fix. Fridge's version (yes, they have versions) have advanced like 7 iterations already from the time I bought it. That means there were at least 7 serious design/manufacturing problems that they had to fix.
* How to turn off ads on your Family Hub The widget will appear by default on the fridges as part of the software update. However, Samsung is giving users the option to turn off ads. To do this, go to the Settings page on the fridge, scroll to Advertisements, select it, and you’ll be taken to a screen where you can toggle off ads.
This will remove the widget entirely. If you think you might actually like the widget’s other features (calendar, weather, and news), you can “X” out a particular ad, and it won’t pop up again. But then you’ll get another ad.
Just like how Youtube won't let you switch off Shorts, but will let you click "Show fewer" which lasts for a few weeks.
Simple would be for the "X" button to offer to turn off Ads completely, do you disagree?
(Disclaimer: I'm a pro / lifelong tech and both are "simple" to me. And to clarify my opinion, my Mom, who is a pro musician, would NOT discover / know how to find that option.)