In terms of a threat-risk analysis, the need of a physical microphone nearby i imagine more than makes up for the risk of an adversary knowing your water quality and electrical consumption as measured by your washer in almost everyones lives atleast..

the use of customer-central water usage data piques my interest. there's a huge market for selling water and waste data to advertisers and other companies interested in consumer data. This is one of my friend's startups, smartpipes, which is a type of smart sewage pipe - these smart washers remind me of smartpipe (which supports dishwasher waste!): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJklHwoYgBQ

It also indicates when you are home or out, and likely an estimate of how many people live there. It could collect more data.

Those pieces of data are combined with others, to form a full picture. This device doesn't need to collect it all itself.

Survellance of private citizens is arguably the foundation of the very dangerous problems in societies around the world, taking away freedom, health, peace, and for most, prosperity. When do you stop it?

I think you might have missed OPs point being about acoustically sending data rather than using bluetooth/WiFi.

If someone is close enough to your home to listen to your washing machine (or more likely, inside) they can probably hear/see you more directly.

> I think you might have missed OPs point being about acoustically sending data rather than using bluetooth/WiFi

I did! Thanks.

If someone can get a bug into my home I'm pretty sure they already know how many people live there and whether we're home..

Ad if someone is bugging my home I think the data transfer from my dishwasher is quite literally the least of my worries.

> It also indicates when you are home or out

Yeah, being able to record sounds that the washer makes would probably also enable you to analyze things people say and extract much more information than 'how many people live there' and 'are they home or not'.

But fortunately for us, you need to actually press a physical button to make the machine sing the diagnostics..

Seems like it’d be a good application for Bluetooth.

Bluetooth modelers don’t age well in these types of environments. Sound is much easier and more reliable.

Why can't it be E2E encrypted? If you can encode data on sound waves, surely you can encode encrypted data on sound waves.

Seems to me like the overhead it would add would way outweigh the benefit for the use case. I wouldn't want to wait an extra 10 seconds for the audio to finish transmitting every time just to prevent nonexistent spies in my kitchen from listening in.

The data/time overhead would be negligible. Engineering overhead to implement it on the other hand, perhaps not.

> The data/time overhead would be negligible.

Doubling or tripling the amount of data sent would be negligible over a wire, but an audio protocol won't be as snappy. Then there's the matter of trust/decryption. How are those keys being kept safe? What happens if I lose access?

Then don't double or triple the amount of data sent. There's simply no need.

You can encrypt data and keep the exact same original byte size.

If you're using symmetric encryption, sure. And then every dishwasher has the same symmetric key, guaranteeing it'll leak.

Everything uses symmetric encryption, including asymmetric encryption. Using symmetric encryption doesn't mean you'd use the same key for every dishwasher, you'd obviously just pair the devices and generate a new key, like everything does nowadays. Also, my dishwasher doesn't use any sort of encryption, and it still leaks.