Man discovers his parents' coffee machine used 1TB of data in 10 days

Re:Man discovers his parents' coffee machine used 1TB of dat... by drop_the_mike on Thursday October 08, 2026 @08:33PM (#50014444)

I'm not the most versed with networking or operating systems but I wonder how difficult it would be to program a raspberry pi to poison the datasets of these types of things. Program it to impersonate a wide set of devices and randomly respond as such in a home. Or even if it would be worth it. Maybe if a phone app could do it too that would make it easy to poison the dataset only when you purchase new smart devices while they do their heavier reconnaissance during the first few weeks (assuming Keurig and the like calm down a bit after some period of time).

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Re:Man discovers his parents' coffee machine used 1TB of dat... by gblargg on Friday October 09, 2026 @12:09AM (#50015893)

If I had a machine like this on my network, I'd be tempted to figure out where it's sending the telemetry data, and help it out by sending a LOT more. It would be funny if they blocked my IP because I was reporting too much data.

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Re:Man discovers his parents' coffee machine used 1TB of dat... by judge2020 on Thursday October 08, 2026 @10:15PM (#50015154)

The only financial impact to them would be your single ad profile. They don't care about having the widest and most accurate knowledge of all devices on their customers' networks to sell as some dataset, they want to target ads at you based on which products you have - and maybe get a bigger payout if it finds something on your network that it advertised to you a whole ago, as that confirmed conversion is worth a ton to advertisers.

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Re:Man discovers his parents' coffee machine used 1TB of dat... by dannyw on Friday October 09, 2026 @12:42AM (#50016063)

Plug for https://adnauseam.io/ ; which is banned from the Google Web Store.

Yes, they can trivially build systems to filter this out, but your favorite coding agent can probably make it more stochastic / clever ;)

In my experience, this has basically 'neutered' personalised advertising for me (I get all kinds of ads, in all kinds of languages, when using my Google account or network w/o an adblocker); so it definitely has an effect.

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Re:Man discovers his parents' coffee machine used 1TB of dat... by MarceliusK on Friday October 09, 2026 @01:13AM (#50016255)

My concern is that poisoning the dataset doesn't really stop the scanning. The device is still poking around your network

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Re:Man discovers his parents' coffee machine used 1TB of dat... by IronyMan1 on Friday October 09, 2026 @02:13AM (#50016631)

Maybe add LLM prompts to poison whatever system is analyzing the Data?

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Re:Man discovers his parents' coffee machine used 1TB of dat... by forinti on Friday October 09, 2026 @08:27AM (#50019515)

I blocked my LG TV and put it behind a router so that it wouldn't sniff around my house, but this is too complicated for most people.

What we need is to ban this sort of thing outright.

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