The owner of LG smart home devices has noticed a disturbing phenomenon.
The so-called smart home devices, that is, connected to the Internet, are gaining more and more space, thanks to their useful functions that can be used to control them remotely and significantly improve their activities. Under normal circumstances, these devices generate little traffic, but a special case has now become the subject of a series of conspiracy theories.
The owner of an LG smart washing machine recently reported that his home machine sends several gigabytes of data daily to a remote server, but even with community brainstorming, no explanation can be found for the reason for this phenomenon.
The story comes from one of X's users, Johnny, who is, by self-identification, active in the fintech sector. On January 9, the man from California shared the following image of the data traffic statistics of his ASUS router, according to which the LG Smart Laundry 2-branded washing machine transfers 3.57 GB of data and downloads 95.75 MB per day.
What is this bullshit! Why does my LG washing machine use 3.6GB of data per day? pic.twitter.com/xQqQicTqxI
-Johnny (@johnny) January 9, 2024
The post was peppered with various theories, including that someone is using the device as part of a botnet to mine cryptocurrency, or that LG itself is scraping data to train a new AI model. Anyway, commenters who also own smart washing machines from the Korean manufacturer reacted to the image, but images taken from their routers reveal outgoing traffic of only about 1MB per day.
By the time Johnny wrote these lines, his investigation had reached the point where the anomaly began on January 4, and the router had already delivered a 3.57GB load to the washing machine's IP address, meaning ASUS was probably not at fault. The fintech specialist also contacted LG, but has not yet received an answer to his question.
