Reprinted from hartmannreport.com
It's time to say "No" to Big Tech and "smart" appliances that are, in reality, data thieves attaching themselves to us and our homes like blood-sucking parasites
A few weeks ago our decade-old, serially-repaired dishwasher gave up the ghost, soaking the kitchen floor in the process. Louise found a replacement online that met her needs and fitted into the space we had, and two burly guys came out this week to install it while she stood outside with all the doors and windows open.
"It's a smart dishwasher," she told me, handing me the instruction manual. "Figure out how to hook it up to my cell phone so we can control it remotely."
I dutifully read the manual and downloaded the app from the overseas company that made the dishwasher. And that's where it got weird.
Even though the dishwasher is in my house, and would be on my in-house WiFi network along with her phone, the app required me to give them my Google or Facebook login information to access their network in another country which would, in turn, control my dishwasher.
That was the point at which I stopped, removed the app from her phone, and Louise and I concluded we're just going to have to fire up the dishwasher the old-fashioned way. We already have too many appliances spying on us.
The thermostat in our house, for example, tells the California company that sells it all about our habits, including when we're home or not.
Our home temperature data could tell the company if somebody is having a medical problem from pernicious anemia or using beta blockers for hypertension (and so is keeping the house abnormally warm) to menopause (popping temperatures all over the place). It could tell a company selling insulation if we need some, or a potential burglar the best time to pop a window.
The thermostat could have been designed to have a "home WiFi-only mode" where the company doesn't get all that info, but, like nearly all the "smart" thermostat companies, they chose not to allow for that.
Ditto for our bed, which is adjustable and tracks our sleep. When I tried to disable sending our information to the company that made it, that effort, in turn, disabled its collecting interesting information about how long and how well we sleep. If we want to know how we're sleeping, we have to share that info with a company we already paid an absurd amount of money to for the bed itself.
Our doorbell also sends our information to its mother ship; they know pretty much everything about us, including how often we get deliveries and from whom, who visits and when, and when that thief tried to break in.
I'm typing the first draft of this article into Microsoft Word, which no longer just runs on my computer; whenever I open the program, it connects to Microsoft who can provide "suggestions" for better grammar and offers to store all my writing on their own servers. If I try to turn off Microsoft's access to my work, they take away my ability to open a PDF file, among other features.
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