Not appy, Jan. How smart devices can fuel misery |
How I scoffed at the mere suggestion. Preposterous, I thought, these scaremongers telling us our household appliances were spying on us.
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Slowly but surely, they've infiltrated our lives. Smart TVs that monitor what we watch, providing useful intel to ad brokers. Smart cars bristling with cameras tracking our every move. Smart watches that check our heart rate. Smart rings that record blood pressure.
We willingly send our intimate data back to companies via their apps and in return we might be told we slept well, walked so many thousands of steps or sat on our bunties and really ought to get up and shake a leg. You know, stuff we could have worked out ourselves before we connected every damn thing to the internet.
Remember the good old days? When you were absolutely capable of opening the fridge and discovering you were running low on milk and the butter would soon need replacing? When the drifts of dog hair prompted you to pull out the vacuum cleaner and run it over the floorboards? When the dandelions shamed you into mowing the lawn?
Now, we're awash with devices that promise to do it all for you - as long as you download the app, set up an account and create yet another password you know you're going to forget before the week's out - just as I did with a new smart washing machine.
Everything else about the front loader was excellent. It was quiet, did a great job with the clothes, had good energy ratings and chimed loudly when the load was done. But I lost interest in the app almost immediately. I didn't need to be told it was nearing the end of the spin cycle when I was out walking the dog.
Same with the robot vacuum cleaner, which would message me when I was at lunch to say it was stuck after ingesting a sock under the bed. It's sat in the cupboard gathering dust ever since I grew tired of having to operate it via an app.
Investigating fridges a few months back and the salesperson was very keen to show me one with a screen on its door that told you what you were running out of and even compiled a shopping list for you, which it sent to your phone via an app. No thanks, I said, I already have too many apps on my phone. And besides an online fridge seems ridiculous.
On that score, I've been proved right.
Across Europe, store fridges connected to the internet have been attacked by hackers. Tonnes of food have been spoiled as temperatures were cranked up remotely in seven countries. In France, 700 supermarkets had their fridges set to defrost mode. One cyber attack was even directed at French blood banks but was........