The one thing I've personally found, is that buying devices with less points of failure has been helpful when possible.
this post was submitted on 31 Oct 2025
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Especially true with fridges. In door water and ice being big points of failure.
Louis Rossmann's Fulu Foundation put out a bounty for anyone who is able to come up with a way to modify the fridge to remove the ads.
The pot is currently at $11,558.00
https://bounties.fulu.org/bounties/samsung-familyhub-refrigerators
He did a video on it here: https://odysee.com/@rossmanngroup:a/we'll-pay-you-10,000-to-de-shitify-this:7
one with "curated advertisements."
Curated? They make it sound so nice. Only the best of advertisements for their customers.
I wonder if it would be possible to blacklist words on my devices or even just lemmy. Curated would be on the list, as well as slammed.
There should be a law that any time someone uses the word slam in a news context it should be about someone literally being slammed.
It's not like people follow the law anymore, but hey it would be something.
Not that I'd own a smart fridge, but if I did and they started shoving ads on it, it'd look like this later that day:
However, Samsung is giving users the option to turn off ads.
For now, like the author herself mentions later on ("The bigger issue is that of trust. [...] that’s today.")
[Higby] “This pilot further explores how a connected appliance can deliver genuinely useful, contextual information. The refrigerator is already a daily hub, and we’re testing a responsible, user-controlled way to make that space more helpful.”
What Shane Higby is saying here boils down to "we're trying to help the user". But if he said so, in clear words, every bloody body would call it bullshit, because it's common knowledge companies smear ads on your face for their own sake - not yours. But if you hide it behind fancy words, like "further explores" and "deliver" and the likes, it's harder to call the bullshit.
I'm getting real tired of this shit.
[Higby] "…future promotions will depend on the feedback and insights gained from the program.”
Translation: "we're just testing the waters now. Let's see if the suckers swallow it or spit it."
This is similar to the justification Panos Panay, Amazon’s [...] He said it was looking to be “elegantly elevating the information that a customer needs.”
Emphasis mine. You can always trust Amazon in one thing: belittling the user.
The problem here isn’t just the ads themselves (although they are a problem); it’s that they are being added to the device after it’s in my home.
[Warning, IANAL.] Fight this shit. Seriously, fight it. On legal grounds. What they're doing should be outright illegal in most countries; it's equivalent to changing a contract unilaterally after both parties signed it.
Additionally, I'd strongly advise against buying any sort of "smart" device, unless you're pretty sure the benefits of connecting your toaster to the internet outweighs all the risks. Including corporations and crackers taking control of it, harvesting your data, spamming you, building kill switches into it, etc.
What they're doing should be outright illegal in most countries; it's equivalent to changing a contract unilaterally after both parties signed it.
Update to [COMPANY NAME]'s Policies
Yes, this should be illegal, but it's already common practice. I'm just hoping that enough of this will eventually get people to stop buying these products, and hopefully we can start seeing some real legislation against it in some countries.
Additionally, I'd strongly advise against buying any sort of "smart" device, unless you're pretty sure the benefits of connecting your toaster to the internet outweighs all the risks.
This should be obvious at this point. "Smart" just means "internet-connected", and we already know what happens to every device that connects to a remote server during regular operation: telemetry (and not the nice debugging kind but the "what do you use" kind), and advertisements.
Including corporations and crackers
The "crackers" part of this confuses me. Samsung is a Korean company. The chairman's name is Lee Jae-yong (이재용). Samsung NA's CEO is Yoonie Joung. Maybe I'm misreading this?
Yes, this should be illegal, but it’s already common practice. I’m just hoping that enough of this will eventually get people to stop buying these products, and hopefully we can start seeing some real legislation against it in some countries.
Problem is, people won't stop buying them. Often "smart" products are sold comparatively cheaper, because the business expects additional profits through ads; and if Samsung is going this way (ads on your fridge), it'll do it.
The “crackers” part of this confuses me. Samsung is a Korean company. The chairman’s name is Lee Jae-yong (이재용). Samsung NA’s CEO is Yoonie Joung. Maybe I’m misreading this?
By "crackers" I mean "black hat hackers". The sort of people who'd love to drop some ransomware into your fridge and then say "if you don't want me to brick your fridge, pay me a few bucks".
(After some websearch, apparently Americans use it as a derogatory term. I wasn't aware of that.)
Wow, I might be old, I guess language changes. Crackers used to be for hackers that focus in bypassing security, like in "code crackers". It seems it is still used for gaming scenes that reverse engineer DRM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_warez_groups - and the colour of the hat, just how they used their skills.
Yeah, the terminology is currently a mess. Not just due to language changes, but also synchronic variation - different people using the same words for different meanings, at the same time. But for me, it's a mix of motivations, methods, and morality:
- hacker strictu sensu - like a kid who dismantles toys to see how they work. Sometimes they break things, but they want knowledge the most. Usually grey hat, sometimes white hat, only rarely black hat
- cracker - like a kid who bashes toys with a hammer. Not interested on the knowledge itself, except when it allows them to bully other kids. Almost always black hat.
By "crackers" I mean "black hat hackers".
Ok I just misread it then, sorry!
No problem - miscommunication happens.
The world was full of flat surfaces that did not yet have an Android-platform device driving a screen displaying advertisements on them.
This is what they will look like for me:
Can't get smart fridge ads if I don't get a smart fridge. taps forehead
Unless, years from now, the only fridges you can buy are smart. Like TVs now.
So, buy fridge add-space to put the ugliest add for dumb-fridges ?
Not on "my" smart fridge... Cause, you know, well fuck that.