LG washing machine sending 3.7GB of data a day

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

An LG smart washing machine was reported to be sending 3.7 GB of data per day, triggering worries about surveillance, botnets, and bloated telemetry from “Internet of Things” appliances. Subsequent checks pointed to inaccurate traffic accounting by the home router, with other owners seeing well under 1 MB per day, but commenters still questioned why a washer needs to talk to the cloud at all. Many advocate for local-only or segmented networks, alternative protocols like Zigbee/Z-Wave, and buying “dumb” appliances to avoid opaque data collection and future lock-in.

Initial Claim vs. Reality

  • Original story: a smart LG washer was reported as sending ~3.7 GB/day via an ASUS router’s stats.
  • Follow-up: the same user later noted “inaccuracy in the ASUS router tool.” Others with LG appliances reported usage typically under ~1 MB/day, often tens of MBs over months.
  • Some routers (ASUS, UniFi, others) are described as unreliable at device identification and traffic accounting, especially with MAC randomization and IP reuse.
  • One commenter is still seeing “suspicious” traffic and started packet captures; exact cause remains unclear.

Is ~1 MB/Day Reasonable?

  • One side: 1 MB/day is “a lot” for a washer; simple usage metrics should only need a few kB, especially if compressed.
  • Other side: high-frequency telemetry (vibration, motor metrics, temperature, fill/drain timing) plus verbose formats (JSON/XML), retries, and poorly designed telemetry systems can easily reach that scale.
  • Some argue engineers over-log and under-compress, mirroring bloat seen in cloud microservices.

What Is the Data For?

  • Pro-telemetry arguments:
    • Field data can improve reliability, correlate failure modes with usage patterns, and inform future designs.
    • Logs can help warranty analysis and targeted engineering fixes.
  • Skeptical views:
    • Many teams “log everything and use almost none of it.”
    • Data may be sold or used to deny warranty claims.
    • Any pervasive data collection is “wrong by default” unless there’s a compelling safety need; even laundry patterns can become sensitive.

Security, Privacy, and Network Design

  • Strong sentiment that appliances should work fully offline; “IoT” is mostly unnecessary internet exposure.
  • Recommended practices:
    • Put IoT on separate VLAN/guest networks, often bandwidth-limited.
    • Prefer Zigbee/Z-Wave or Bluetooth with local control over WiFi+cloud.
    • Use smart plugs or power meters to infer cycle status instead of vendor clouds.
  • Concerns about:
    • Botnets using such devices (some think plausible, others say infection paths are unclear).
    • Consumer-grade routers being insecure, under-patched, and poor at monitoring.

Usefulness of Smart Washers

  • Reported genuine benefits:
    • Cycle-finished notifications, remote start/scheduling (e.g., off-peak power), integration with solar PV, resource-usage stats.
  • Many still feel these are marginal gains not worth the privacy and complexity, especially when similar outcomes can be achieved with “dumb” machines plus local automation.