Your washing machine could be sending 3.7 GB of data a day — LG washing machine owner disconnected his device from Wi-Fi after noticing excessive outgoing daily data traffic

Clickbait, he tweeted “inaccuracy in the ASUS router tool” later on.

In a follow-up post a day after his initial Tweet, Johnie noted “inaccuracy in the ASUS router tool,” with regard to Apple iMessage data use. Other LG smart washing machine users showed device data use from their router UIs. It turns out that these appliances more typically use less than 1MB per day.
the writer knew that the stats were bunk, yet wrote the article anyway. the site knew this, too, tacked-on the clickbait headline and published it. toms really has gone to shit the last few years--at least under the current ownership (last changed hands 2018).
- Speaking of which, it uses the same web interface as a lot of other news sites. Newsletter popup, autoplay video part-way down that then jumps to the top of the screen, etc. What Hifi is the same, and there are various other sites all with the same annoying engine. Two questions: (1) are all these sites owned by the same company and (2) is there a browser extension that can fix them?
- and here we are 17 hours later with it as one of the top stories on this site.
  We are soooooooo reddit 2.0.
- And OP presumably read the article, knew there was no actual story, and posted it here anyway.
Thanks for saving me the click.

Anybody in his right minds wouldn't connect a washing machine to WiFi in the first place.

I'd connect it to wifi maybe. I wouldn't connect it to the Internet.
When it comes to home automation I'm generally onboard, but it's local control or nothing.
- That's a good strategy. You can do a lot of smart home automation with two separate networks, where one has Internet access and the other doesn't.
  Here's a reminder, keep your old routers, having an extra can really come in handy.
- Will wifi switches locked down to home network only still function?
I dunno about you, but I would love to get a notification on my watch when the machine has finished it's cycle. The stupid high pinched repeated beeping noise sucks... especially when it's the next door neighbour's washing machine and they're not even home, so it goes on and on for fucking hours. And I'd like to see proper error descriptions on my phone, instead of just "UE" on the timer LCD. WTF is a "UE" error?
If we're going to get really fancy... I'd love to be able to load the machine in the morning, but tell it to actually start running several hours later while I'm at work. I obviously don't want clean wet clothes going mouldy in the washing machine all day... but I don't really want to run the washing machine when I'm home either, because it's noisy.
Remote activation would also be better for the environment and also better for my clothes - I'd use the the slow gentle economy cycle every time if I could remotely trigger it at 3pm on a weekday. I'm definitely not going to use that on the evenings (when I'll be asleep in 3 hours) or on weekends (when I don't know if I'll be home in 3 hours time).
A wifi connected washing machine sounds like a great feature to me, and I'd happily pay for it (with dollars, not with an invasion of privacy). I guess that means I won't be buying an LG.
- I don't know. My washing machine beeps three times in increasing intervals, so it isn't that intrusive. The display shows me unique error codes that I can look up when someone happens. And I can set the machine to finish in a set amount of hours, so it will start just in time to be done when I'm back. All without WiFi
- My home assistant tracks the power usage of my washing machine (via a Tasmota plug) and notifies me when the power goes under a threshold for a few minutes. Which happens at the end of the washing cycle.
- WTF is a "UE" error?
  User Error, as always /s
- wet clothes going mouldy in the washing machine all day.
  Never heard such a thing. I recommend to get a German one. Seriously.
- I do something very similar with my connected dishwasher and Home Assistant. It's way over-engineered due various limitations/odd design choices with the API and the machine itself), but I've got it setup to store the selected program when I press a button on a Hue Tap switch, and then it turns on and runs that program when our off-peak energy rate kicks in - which is better than working out how much to set on the delay timer each evening to start it in the right ballpark.
  Of course I've also got it setup to announce the selected program, and that the machine is "armed" via Google Home when the button is pressed, and again each time the door is opened/closed to add new dishes. And it sends notifications to my phone when the program starts (mostly for debugging purposes) and ends.
  Like I said, massively over-engineered but it was a fun little project.
  I don't have a smart washing machine (yet) but I do have it plugged into a smart plug with an energy monitor. When the power usage drops to near zero for more than 2 minutes it sends a notification to tell me that the cycle is done.
- How old is your washing machine? All of the washing machines that I have had over the last 15 years have had unique error codes, a button combination to turn off the buzzer and a delayed end functionality. Just set the program, click on the clock icon and set the program end time.
As an appliance repair man if 20 years don't ever connect your application to the wifi.
Knowing what part of the cycle your washing machine is in at all times is useless information.
- Exactly. Everyone has a device that can tell them when the machine is done. It is the programmable alarm in everyone's mobile phone.
Anybody in his right minds wouldn't ~~connect~~ buy a washing machine to with WiFi in the first place.
Ftfy
Said this elsewhere recently, family had a washing machine for 30 years, from when I was little to in my 30's. Just fixed as needed. Could've still fixed it when they replaced it, just felt it was time.
I've never had dirty clothes come out of a washing machine, using cold water and powder soap. Not sure why people think an agitator needs all this nonsense attached.
I still buy my machines used off Craigslist. Current one (apartment style) is 20 years old, I've had it for 5 if them. Cost me less than $200. Replaced a spring for $20 so far.
There are no IoT/smart devices in my house (well, damn TV, but I'm workin on that).
- Only company that makes dumb TVs anymore is Scepter, but those TV are a dice roll cause in the same model 1 tv can have a great screen and 1 can have a horrible one.. and I've had the bad luck of the draw to get multiple bad screens that looked like shit.
  So I gave up and bought a TLC.
  I cracked it open and unplugged the wifi antenna though, cause you can bet your ass that bitch will never have a chance to phone home and report any and all network snooping.
- Would a large monitor with a streaming box work?
Why would anyone need a Wi-Fi enabled washing machine. You put clothes in it, and then use the same setting you use every single time you use it, why do you need a complicated interface with a smartphone app for that?
It's mainly done for smart bome feature. People want fully automated homes, and right now more than 90% of all "smart devices are basically botnets. Zigbee ftw.
It’s smart not to connect “smart” devices
But then anybody can connect to its default broadcast. Better to pair it to something you can control.
Why not?
My washing machine has wi-fi. I didn't buy it for that reason, but it just happens to. Using the app, I have some programme options that aren't possible to select using the hardware dials. I can do things like change the detergent dosage and the number of additional rinse cycles. It has some "special" programmes for various specific fabrics. And it has things like maintenance diagnostics and the ability to run a specific self-cleaning cycle.
That's all pretty useful.
And what's the actual danger of connecting it to wi-fi? Will Big Data know how often I wash my towels? Do I need to worry about the government spying on my fabric softener usage? Will hackers seize control of my machine and ransom my ability to get clean underwear?
I just can't see the big downside here (other than the fact that the machine is more complicated than it needs to be, but that ship has already sailed seeing as I already own it).
- And what's the actual danger of connecting it to wi-fi?
  Not so much that hackers will ransom the washing machine, but that hackers can use IoT devices as a back-door to get into your home network and take over everything else too.
- Will hackers seize control of my machine and ransom my ability to get clean underwear?
  It’s more likely that they’d seize control of it and add it to their botnet. Which is exactly what it looks like happened here. There was a small package downloaded, then a large amount of outgoing data. That looks like a compromised IoT device being used for a botnet. Small incoming package to hack the device, then the device starts spamming some poor dude across the country as part of a DDOS, because he beat a script kiddie in a COD match and the script kiddie is salty about it.
- My washing machine has wi-fi. I didn't buy it for that reason, but it just happens to. Using the app
  So you did not just connect it to your home wifi, but you also allowed the vendor to connect it to their servers. Now the vendor knows the name of your WiFi and the password. Just to begin with. Next year maybe this vendor's website will get hacked and 20000 such wifi passwords go public in some darknet :-)
  Using the app, I have some programme options that aren't possible to select using the hardware dials.
  Who benefits? You may find it cool to have it in the app, but FIRST the vendor has saved some of their money by not building the needed dials and buttons for these functions. (Or did they give you that discount? ;-))
  And maybe in 3 years from now, they don't feel like maintaining your app anymore. Are you going to shout "WARRANTY" at them?
  I just can't see the big downside here (other than the fact that the machine is more complicated than it needs to be
  Yes, that is a downside, too. Part of this 'smartness' could break and maybe even the whole thing stops working when these 'diagnostics' give false data.
  Another huge point is: My washing machines so far have lasted between 8 - 15 years. But NEVER has any wifi-active device lived that long. Think about this difference, and who's the one who benefits from it?
- When it starts spying on you, sending conversations, like many smart cars, it is just the beginning.

Yes, socks can turn into a lot of data really fast, especially if they are multithreaded. Which is why I only use single threaded socks to protect my dataplan.
Given that one sperm has 27.5 MB of data (which means each orgasm has over 7 petabytes of information!) I think we can safely assume which socks his washer is transmitting.
- Given that one sperm has 27.5 MB of data (which means each orgasm has over 7 petabytes of information!)
  Redundancy!
- The info in each sperm is effectively identical, so it's still only 27.5 MB of data in the whole thing, just with a lot of redundancy for error detection / correction.
SOCKS
You wouldn't download a sock
I'm too lazy to Photoshop it into a real image
I'm sure they're being downloaded to Russia and then sold back to the west to finance the war!
Modem = Materializer and De-Materializer

LG's app is an absolute privacy nightmare too. That app must be used if you want access to any smart appliance features and it requires precise location permissions 100% of the time. Even then, the app features are mediocre, it doesn't work very well and often doesn't notify of a finished wash load until long after it's completed.

Why anyone would want to allow their washing machine manufacturer to continuously track their exact location in exchange for some crappy, poorly implemented features is beyond me.

Thanks for pointing out the location service thing. I just killed that shit.
The LG app also checks SafetyNet/Play Integrity so you can't use it with root. They probably fear that you can then unleash how much more of a privacy nightmare it is.
They probably want to see at which aisle your washing machine spends the most time on its grocery trip.
I just use a timer on my phone .... average wash cycle I use is about 30 minutes ... just set a timer on your phone ... KISS, Keep It Simple Stupid
Just looked at the app's permission settings on my phone... set to only allow location while being used.
Like you I don't see much use for the app, though the notifications can be handy if you want to know when a load us finished and you can't hear it's beeps. I work out of my basement with my washer upstairs so that can be the case with me. But still rare that I ever use it.
- I deleted the app and disconnected my LG appliances from wifi over a year ago. Maybe they fixed the issue.
- Thinking back, I seem to remember that in order to receive notifications the app had to be running in the background while phone location was turned on, giving LG price location tracking all the time. Is that no longer the case?

No it couldn’t. My washing machine cant connect to my network! I can’t think of a valid reason why I would even want that.

I can think of a very valid reason. I very often forget that I ran the washing machine, I'm already investigating how to send a notification to my phone or computer after it is done. Right now I am checking how much electricity it consumes and when it stops doing it. But a API would be nicer.
- They sell clean/dirty indicator magnets for dishwashers for like $2.
- What about a NFC tag that starts a timer on your phone?
- On one hand, it would be nice for us to drop the smart plug here, but at least those can be entirely local-only. I highly doubt any device API would be local.
- stick a bell onto it and take a moment to listen whenever you want to check.
- Have you considered setting an alarm on your phone?
I tried it with our dish washer, just to see what it's about. Turns out it's all about nothing. It's absolutely void of any useful functionality.
Yeah, I don't get it. I guess I can see the appeal of some "Internet Of Things" connected appliances, like smart fridges suggesting recipes and keeping track of stock and auto-populating shopping lists for you. I don't need that personally, but I can see why it could appeal to some people.
But things like washing machines and dishwashers? You need to be there in person to fill them up just before they're ready to go on, and to empty them when they're done. And when they're not turned on, they're sat there doing nothing. What "smart" functions can they even offer?
- What "smart" functions can they even offer?
  Notification that the cycle is finished and checking how much is left.
  But that's about it.
- The joke when I was a kid was the remote control toaster.
- I guess I can see the appeal of some "Internet Of Things"
  IoT, where the "S" stands for security...
Because it's advertised. That's why.
A remarkable (and actually concerning) percentage of people completely lack the critical thinking skills to question whether that's a good idea. The box says it has WiFi, WiFi is good, so I connect it to WiFi. Simple as that.

You are doing it wrong!

Imagine spending extra money on a new clothes washer only to have someone turn it in to a crypto miner. 😬

I'm too lazy to come up with a witty money laundering joke.

It really irritates me when IoT devices force you to use "the cloud" for access. My home automation consists of roughly 100 devices. The vast majority are Zigbee, but a few use wifi. With the exception of my irrigation controller, all the wifi devices are blocked at the firewall from accessing the internet. The fact that I have to send a command half way across the country to a remote server only so it can send it right back to my home network when I want to change the watering schedule for my plants is ridiculous. Sure, I could buy a different controller, but I already spent $300 once. I'm not doing it again.

You should explain this to your plants so they show the appropriate level of gratitude.
Will wifi switches locked down to home network only still function?
- If it has an API that can be used locally, then sure. That’s the whole point of Zigbee, is that it’s an open standard that any IoT devices can connect to and use. So you can send local commands to any local Zigbee device, as long as they have an API that allows for it.
- It depends on the switch. If it has an API or an app that can be used locally, then yes.

Why are people connecting their machines to wifi in the first place?

I can understand wanting it on your local network. Being able to check remotely how much time is remaining. Getting alerts if it needs maintenance. In a big house with multiple family members all doing laundry, just checking to see if the machine is in use before hauling all your stuff down could be nice. But, that info doesn't need to leave the house. I don't know why you'd want that information leaving the house.
- You know, I really like to know if my washing machine has finished when I am on vacation. /s
It's starts with a sales pitch (not just to you, it's sales pitches all the way down) about how the washer can send the user status, maybe let them schedule, etc. They probably have an app to pair with it to keep it all in-house. One thing leads to another, every appliance gets wifi and sends a ton of data to a totally undoubtedly secure and anonymous centralized server full of harmless data for the sake of saving the customer 15 steps.
Big Brother didn't ride in on the back of a commie tank, he was invited in for the slightest increase of convenience.
It tells them when the cycle is done. Which apparently a beep can't do.
- My machines are in a disconnected garage. There's no hearing the beep. And the wash time varies due to load size, to the point that the estimate on the screen isn't very accurate, so seeing a timer isn't great either.
  I have never bothered to connect them to wifi yet, though. But a phone notification would have is uses.

IoT = bad

Plot twist: it was the Asus router misreporting the amount of data.

Until a robot can hang up my washing, my machine is staying off any networks

When it can you should still setup a private network just for them to communicate
- Yep, one for private use, one for this kind of machines and one for guests. But still, in theory it could be sending sensitive data regardless of network setup.

Thats gonna me my new excuse when I loose in CoD. The washing machine was clogging up the Network.

It was busy uploading a sock.

If you buy a "smart" washing machine and actually connect it to the internet, you deserve what you get.

I can think of a few smart functionalities of a washer that'd be nice. None of these would be motivation enough to buy one though, unless it was open source, which I'd guess isn't a thing.
- Yeah, I wouldn't mind getting a notification on my phone ... sometimes I don't hear the little chime or I do but I'm the middle of something and forget.
The smart people don’t connect these “smart” devices to the network
- I don't even let my smart TV connect to the internet. Why would I help it fetch ads for me lol

Bought “smart” LG fridge, range and dishwasher a couple of years ago and never connected any of them, they function like they are supposed to, refrigerate, heat food and clean dirty dishes. No need to connect.

Fridge manual explained something like “in case of peak energy consumption your smart energy company can send a signal to your fridge to not use power”. What the heck do I need that for? To find spoiled food and mold growing in the fridge later on?

Why does one need to connect a range to WiFi?

Some people have hourly electric pricing, in their case it's worth scheduling stuff based on predicted pricing. How that should is that you'd have a home server which controls your IoT stuff (so the gadgets themselves can be firewalled from the internet and controlled only by you) and then your server would fetch pricing data and pause stuff that doesn't need to run when prices are high and run stuff like washing when it's cheap
- TIL - cool, makes sense.
  It would make sense if we had a server that could fetch prices instead of opening up potential weak systems to the internet.
Turning your fridge off for an hour will not cause your food to spoil. You probably won't even notice a difference since they are well insulated. Turning off the compressor during the hour where most of everyone gets home and turns on their AC can have a noticeable effect on grid stability if done widely enough. I do this with a smart switch connected to my HA server instead of using cloud based connections, but the effect is the same and I've never had my food spoil because of it.
The only reason I used my range's WiFi is to preheat it from downstairs or the store lol
- what the heck is a range? search results are expectedly useless as it's an extremely common word for something else
Because now manufacturers are tying the last year of their warranty to having the devices connected to their stupid information harvesting apps.
As a guy with some tendencies to worry if I turned my stove off Everytime I leave the house, this feature seems right up my list of needs

There are probably 3 main groups of people with WiFi appliances:

The vast majority of people don't care, and put it on their normal WiFi router and would never notice something like this
A smaller group of people don't care much, but pay attention to their bandwidth usage and would spot an appliance trying to send 3.7 GB of data a day
A much smaller group of people are paranoid and would put the device on its own isolated subnet, or use firewall-type features to limit the access their appliances have to the Internet.

My guess is that if this were a widespread problem, people in the second group would notice, or would have immediately checked and chimed in and said "holy crap, mine is doing this too". I didn't hear many people saying that, so I'm guessing this is a bug, and it's either a one-off weirdness, or it's a bug related to people in group 3 who are blocking their appliances from being able to connect to the Internet.

It's probably something as simple as a badly programmed firmware update check that doesn't do exponential backoff when it fails. It probably connects, fails, then immediately tries again. A proper exponential backoff would wait before trying again, and if it failed again it would double the wait time down to some minimum value like once per day or something.

Incidentally, this is also why claims about smartphones monitoring people's conversations when they're supposedly off is BS. That would require either huge amounts of bandwidth to transmit all the conversations, or huge amounts of computing power inside the phone to decode the voices. Either way you'd be using tons of battery, and probably a significant amount of bandwidth. There are enough paranoid people out there that if this were a real thing, someone would have caught the devices doing it by now.

I think the largest group by far isn't listed: people who bought an appliance and didn't care at all that it had WiFi and never connected it their network.
- "Error: Wi-Fi must be enabled and connected to load detergent."
The article gets into what actually happened.
Dude’s Asus router was incorrectly reporting bandwidth usage.

I have a similar model washer/dryer and refuse to put it on my wifi. I only want it to wash and dry.

A: Why would a washing machine have internet access? B: If it has the option, why would You even connect it to the internet? C: If it has to be connected to the internet, why would You even buy it?

At least regarding the last point: maybe because there was no other option.
If you need specific features or have certain space constraints, you may end up with only two or three devices.
As an example: try to find a TV (not a monitor, a real TV with tuner, etc) without WiFi. Almost impossible.
A: Why would a washing machine have internet access?
They can download customized wash cycles if you're into that sort of thing. They can also communicate through an app to do things like tell you when a load of laundry is finished, when it's time to run it through a self-cleaning cycle, and give specific details when it encounters problems (e.g., mine once notified me the hot water line was giving it cold water). They also allow you to start a cycle remotely, but tend to require enabling that manually via button press for some reason, so that feature's basically useless.
I'll have a go!
A: It was the best reviewed washer and dryer on Cordcutter when I needed to replace ours.
B: Because getting a notification on your phone that your clothes are done is cool, and being able to start a load from your phone from anywhere is cool.
C: It doesn't need to be connected. As a matter of fact, they stopped connecting to WiFi after about a year, and now they just work like a normal washer and dryer set. I miss the notifications, but not enough to try and figure out how to get them back online.

The issue with web IpT is that devices send data reports of their status every fraction of a second. The packet may just be a few bytes but over time it adds up. Instead I wished they could just send status when they change state and wait for a confirmation but that’s harder to code…

If (Status != Prev_Status) {Send_All_User_Data();}
- Yes! The issue is that if the server misses that packet, the status is now wrong. So they need an aknowledgement send from the server.
A washimg machine isnt a micro frontend, the machine should do all the calculations on cpu and not report every time the drum spins or whatever.
- I think it’s dumber than that. It just sends a status:on every 0.5sec
No they don't. Most send updates every 5 seconds, every minute etc.
- My MyQ garage door would disagree with you.

Why a washing machine need the connect to the Internet in the first place?

So that they can call it "smart" and charge more for it.
- Don’t forget they can now get you to download their app to use those smrt features. Load that app…yes, that’s right.
  Now that you’ve done that, they have your sweet sweet data.
- Sad but true.
- A "smart" label makes me assume it i going to do a bunch of shit I don't want it to while failing early because it is overly complex.
Reporting when it finishes, allowing remote start, collecting statistics, downloading improved firmware to name few. None of these are essentials though.
Edit: uploading - downloading
So you can manually put your laundry inside it, go to your bed and tell the machine to wash it like you didn't had to get up to put your laundry inside it.

Just put the device on a separate wifi without internet access, or look at the "child protection" features of your router. Ours can put devices based on their MAC into "access groups" which range from "full access" over "internet from \ to to "no internet at all".

The article mentions that his router is probably to blame.
Kind of wild we're getting to the point where various pieces of equipment, with hardware we don't want to use, need to be tricked into connecting to a fake network in order to prevent themselves from publishing their credentials.
And that's if we assume there aren't open Wi-Fi networks they won't connect to automatically, in order to do their dirty deeds undeterred by their pesky owners.
- Luckily, most embedded devices lack the smart to attach to two networks at the same time. So you keep it locked into a network where it can only do your bidding, and it won't listen to anyone else. Unless they built in some very crazy and nefarious code and drive around with network enabled cars in the owners neighborhood.

I have a new LG dishwasher, last month it sent a total of 2.7M up 1.2M down. When it’s on it does about 50KB up and 150KB down.

What do you think it's sending?
- Status for time remaining, wash cycle, delayed start timers, rinse aid levels, etc. It also logs diagnostic info for the mechanics to help a tech troubleshoot a repair… Info about the heater, motor, temp sensor, etc.
  I also see the occasional spike for tiny firmware updates.
- What do you think it's sending?
  It's judging your underwear.
Legitimately, why? Depending on compression, in a month it sent the equivalent of 2.5 Holy Bibles worth of information to their server.
- My guess? It’s probably because the job listing for “Sr. Dishwasher Software Engineer” doesn’t exactly attract top talent.
  Top tech companies don’t look at your resume and say “Bruh. This stallion worked on the LG dishwasher firmware?!”

Was it being used as a node in a botnet? Or did it glitch somehow to keep sending over and over again? I can't image that behavior is nominal for that washing machine.

His router fucked up reporting stats.

Tomorrow is my turn to post about this

It would be so funny if washing machines were the first to become sentient

"Wash my clothes"
"No..."

The only reason I can think of is to be alerted when the thing is done, but our phones have this thing called a timer that can be set to the any amount of time and it'll count down to 0. It will even make noise when the timer gets to 0!

Sure they have, put down the bong and stop hallucinating. Phones counting, backwards even, and making noises lol sure thing, Cheech.
- I swear! My cousin's friend's brother has a girlfriend in another country and she showed them and my cousin posted it on tiktok and now he's an influencer.
I love that my phone still can only do one timer. So if I need to keep track of two things I have to use my watch and my phone. Like a primitive savage

My Xerox 6510 pings Google every second. It made it hard to go through my AdGuard Home logs, so no it is banned from DNS.

I was looking at one of those new washer/dryer combo units recently (I have heard these are common in Europe but they are fairly new to the US market) and it had a unique feature where you could fill the detergent reservoir, scan the barcode on the bottle, and the machine would dispense the appropriate amount of detergent for the load.

I can see connecting to the Internet on occasion might be helpful here to update the local barcode database, but I doubt it should need updating more often than once or twice a year. Does that mean the feature will work without constant live updates? Probably not, but I doubt it needs to update very often to remain current.

How do I know this kind of thing ? What app can I use to measure this for my devices at home ?

If you have anything where internet is an add-on to what it does normally, especially BS like a washing machine, then it's phoning home. That's the reason they add such nonsense, and sell it as a feature to the buyer.
They have to run a backend for this stuff which eats into the profit of selling it...
That said, Wireshark is a common tool to monitor packets. I haven't done it for a while. There's also probably a package you can run on RPi just for this kind of thing. Using PiHole I can see how often and where devices are connecting. I've blocked a lot of domains - I'm currently blocking about 30% of all domain requests (most of that is from the TV and windows 10) and everything works fine.
The software would need to be on the router itself so that it can intercept all traffic that is originating from the LAN (Local Area Network) and is directed at the WAN (Wide Area Network, the Internet), some higher end (home) routers have this feature, or you could see if your router supports a third-party firmware and flash that, which most likely supports it.
The other (more complex) way is to put a device in between your router's LAN port (usually called the Default Gateway in software terms) and the rest of your devices on the network so that it intercepts all the traffic and then forwards it to the router. This is a technique known as "Man in the Middle".
If you want to simply know if devices are "phoning home", and potentially blocking those requests, you can use a service like NextDNS or PiHole (on a Raspberry Pi, or in Docker) to block the attempt. This happens because the device doesn't know where to send the info.

I need internet for reasons proceeds to send visual and audio recordings

Meh. It's an article based on a guy who didn't even see what the data it was sending was our even if it was bugged

I'm loving the puns quoted in the article haha

I have this really complicated home setup where I have these little switches on the walls and they control the lights it's very clever.

With home automation sure I could turn the lights on and off in a room I'm not in but since I'm not in that room I don't see the point. Anyway I can just pretend I've done that and then I'm not in the room so I won't know it hasn't happened. I really don't see the point.

You can get home automated door locks, why. In what scenario would you ever want to unlock the door except when you're in front of the door?

When you want to let someone else in?
- If there's a person I want to be able to gain entry to my property when I'm not there then I'll give them a key.
  It just seems like a solution in search of a problem. Worse still it's a solution that might be hacked. Security locks, and key safes are far cheaper and much safer.
I'd like to have a door lock that did not allow wireless unlock, but does allow locking and checking status to see if you forgot to do so (plus automations tied to the door state).
With automations, you can also do stuff like locking the door under certain conditions (say it's late at night and it's been left unlocked for X hours), sending alerts or updating other devices depending on the lock state. You could have it strobe your bedroom light if stuff is left unlocked late too etc etc