An engineer got curious about how his iLife A11 smart vacuum worked and monitored the network traffic coming from the device. That’s when he noticed it was constantly sending logs and telemetry data to the manufacturer — something he hadn’t consented to. The user, Harishankar, decided to block the telemetry servers’ IP addresses on his network, while keeping the firmware and OTA servers open. While his smart gadget worked for a while, it just refused to turn on soon after. After a lengthy investigation, he discovered that a remote kill command had been issued to his device.
This is why free software is so important. The company can just lie to you about their product and for some reason it isn’t illegal. I really want to have a dishwasher and washing machine with an ESP32 controller and free software to control it, ideally with Home Assistant integration, but at this point I can’t find anything.