I love smart home technology, and I’ve always dreamed of living in the house of Back to the Future 2 or The Jetsons, but as a grownup with a little more experience of what technology is really like on a day-to-day basis, I have some reservations about what should or should not be “smart”. With “smart” these days meaning “connected to the cloud”.
A key device I never want to connect to the mothership is my fridge!
Because it’s a fridge, not a smartphone
I don’t mean that I don’t want a smarter fridge. There are plenty of ways fridges can be smarter, but the fridge I have at this moment is already pretty good at its job. It keeps my food at the temperature I specify, and does it using as little power as possible.
We all have smartphones, smart TVs, and various other smart gadgets scattered around our homes. I don’t need my fridge to tell me what the weather is like outside or play YouTube videos. I certainly don’t need it pinging me with notifications or keeping track of my shopping habits. Not everything that runs on electricity needs an app or a network connection.
Wi-Fi adds complexity where none is needed
Adding smart features and Wi-Fi to a fridge just adds more failure points. Updates will go wrong, or support for features will go away. I don’t know about you, but a fridge is one of those things I only replace when it’s beyond repair. I’ve only bought two fridges in the last 20 years, and I don’t want something that will go wrong for no good reason four or five years after purchase.
I don’t care how many years of support a company promises for a smart device, my fridge is a mission-critical appliance. I literally cannot afford to have something go wrong with it. Especially if it’s something a local technician can’t fix with spare parts and a toolbox. Don’t think I’ll ever forget how an Amazon server outage bricked people’s extremely expensive smart beds (as reported by 404 Media) and left them unable to sleep in the beds they owned in many cases.
Privacy and security aren’t afterthoughts—they’re after you
If there’s one thing the last few years of “smart” home devices has taught me is that if something has a screen, they’ll find a way to put ads on it. It’s getting harder and harder to escape the slide into that one Black Mirror episode where the guy is trapped in a room and forced to look at ads, and even closing his eyes doesn’t work because they just torture him with sound until he looks again.
The worst part of this is that some of these devices—quite expensive ones at that—are Trojan horses for advertising. The ads come later after people have already bought their gadgets. This is happening with Samsung smart fridges and my own LG CS OLED TV only started showing ads after an update about a year after I bought it.
It’s not just having advertising shoved in your face, but also the privacy issues that come with network-connected smart devices. Just look at the Automatic Content Recognition scandal where it turns out that many smart TVs are spying on everything you watch. Even your private home movies, which are sampled and sent away to a data center for analysis. They promise all sorts of privacy safeguards are in place, but then use an opt-out model and complicated legal language to hide the fact this is happening while covering themselves in case it ever goes to court.
At least with a smart TV, I can cut it off from my network and use something like an Apple TV with its (for now) better privacy protection, but if you’re buying a smart fridge that defeats the points, so I might as well skip the whole exercise and just get a box that makes things cold without building a marketable profile for data brokers.
The beauty of staying offline
I want a fridge that doesn’t need to be rebooted, doesn’t have to check in with an update server, and won’t ever lock me out because of a bug in its software. it needs to plug into the wall, ask me “how cold would sir like the food” and then do nothing but literally chill out until I need a snack.
I bought my wonderfully dumb Samsung fridge relatively recently, and so I expect to be fine for a few years yet (fingers crossed), but what really worries me is that the next time I have to buy a fridge, I won’t have any other choice besides a “smart” model. I doubt very many people will pay to be the beta testers for these expensive, privacy-invading advertising billboards you can keep food in, but once the companies that make them get the kinks sorted out and figure out how to make enough money out of your data efficiently, then you can bet there will be affordable smart fridges galore.