Samsung Pilots Making Its Smart Fridges Billboards After People Bought Them
from the are-fridges-licensed-now-too? dept
Let’s do a thought experiment together. I want you to imagine that six months ago, you bought a couch. It’s a lovely couch and you put a lot of time and energy into making sure you got the right one. For six months, you’ve sat on this couch, napped on it, sometimes even slept on it overnight. And then, one day, as you’re laying on the couch, the armrest whispers to you, “Would you like to buy a soda?”
What would you do?
Well, once I was done reciting whatever that creepy priest from The Exorcist said to get the demon-spawn out of my furniture, I’d probably call the furniture store and ask them what the fuck their problem is, because this couch is not behaving like the one I bought. And if the store then told me that it actually wasn’t my couch, but it was instead their couch and that I was just paying to use it for a while, well, I would dial up my therapist and ask for an emergency session because clearly I’ve gone kazoo.
But suddenly, if you turn the couch into a Samsung smart fridge, this all somehow is okay.
Days after someone revealed the news on social media, Samsung confirmed today that it is showing advertisements on some US customers’ smart fridges. Samsung said the ads showing on some Family Hub-series fridges are part of a pilot program, but we suspect that they may become more permanent additions to Samsung fridges and/or other types of screen-equipped smart home appliances.
In a statement sent to Ars Technica, Samsung confirmed that it is “conducting a pilot program to offer promotions and curated advertisements on certain Samsung Family Hub refrigerator models in the US market.”
Once again, we have products that many people purchased when they operated one way, only to have the manufacturer update them remotely such that they operate a different way. And, while you’ll have to forgive my presuming so, I’m confident that any poll of these customers asking them if they want their refrigerators to suddenly start annoying them with advertisements, they’d say no.
So who owns these damned things? Are we really in a place where we’re “licensing” a fridge? If not, why the hell is the seller now messing with and changing the thing I already bought? In what other walk of life, other than digital and IoT products, is this accepted by the public?
And they did this without any real notice to anyone at all.
Samsung declined to respond to specific questions sent about the pilot program, including which fridge models are affected and its response to customers who may be irked that their expensive appliance is suddenly showing ads.
Samsung hasn’t been particularly forthcoming about the program, which appears to have been publicly disclosed for the first time by a Reddit user, as spotted by SamMobile.
A surprise pilot program to change how a product operates in a way that will certainly annoy customers who already bought it.
Thank the universe this isn’t how my couch works.
Filed Under: ads, fridge ads, smart refrigerator, who wants this?
Companies: samsung
Comments on “Samsung Pilots Making Its Smart Fridges Billboards After People Bought Them”
This is why I’m holding on to my older appliances tooth & nail. I don’t care what it costs to fix them (not that they’ve needed a lot of fixing).
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You won’t laugh so hard when theses smart fridges will to track all you food products and notify you when something has expired or running out, as they were supposed to do for theses last 15 years.
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I think that idea was mostly an excuse to sell people fridges with built-in billboards. It would kind-of half-solve a problem that’s not totally bogus, but isn’t that important to most people.
I’ve picked apples several times over the last 6 weeks or so. If the fridge could detect and pinpoint rotten ones somehow, while they’re stored for the next few months, that’d help me out, but I don’t see how it’d even be possible. (I’m not going to affix an RFID tag to each, nor do I want to be inputting counts and shelf locations every time I add, remove, or move one.)
Just looking at a storage or expiry date is pretty useless. Many of my condiments and spices are months or years past their dates, with no plausible food-safety concerns. Eggs can usually last at least a month beyond the printed date. Most fruit isn’t very predictable; from the same container, one item might go bad in days, while others could last months.
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Oh so you enter all the expiration dates as you put your food in the fridge? And then it reminds you? Do you tell it when you’ve eaten something?
Eh, I guess you were being sarcastic but I’m posting this anyway.
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Well, I’m not laughing so hard at that; it seems too plausible. Although all of it could be done using a phone or other computer, probably much more easily.
If we wanted to “nerd harder”, as they say, we could imagine RFID tags attached to all foods, maybe scales and image recognition (“A.I.”) to see how much is left in each container, and so on. In other words, a ridiculous amount of work to solve a “problem” most people already have a handle on. (The more cynical might say it’s solving Samsung’s problem of “how do we extract more money from people who already bought our products?”, and maybe A.I. branding will actually work for that.)
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Old fridges can be tricky to obtain and fix, due to refrigerant phase-outs and other things. My local “ReStore” thrift stores always seem to have 20-to-50-year-old stoves, though, in the 50-100 dollar range, and the exposed-element types can basically work forever with only minor repairs. (When I removed the back cover from mine, I even found a schematic inside.)
But many people are reluctant to buy these on account of them being “out of style”. Often, people just leave them at their curb as garbage.
Yeah, had seen this. The fact that a fridge can be updated in the first place is a non-starter. Remotely – no fuckin way. And why we arebuying an internet connected fridge with a screen… consumers like thi… ugh. WTF, people? Sometimes it is hard to have sympathy, even when i disagree with the business as much as they do, because they keep feeding the goddamned enemy.
Does the fridge have “AI” like your washing machine?
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Do you mean “a fridge’s software”? Because being able to “update” a fridge, such as by changing the compressor or a fan, could be a really useful feature.
Actually, even limited updates to the software could be useful. Maybe I’d benefit from some minor tweaks to my defrosting schedule, for instance.
Confirmation Bias
I think this is great. There are already so many reasons not to buy a Samsung fridge. I like the way they’re piling it on.
Picky grammar
Lying on the couch.
“And then, one day, as you’re laying on the couch”…
If you’re laying, you’re a chicken.
Re: But if you're lying
But if you’re lying on the couch, you might be Donald Trump.
Re: Re: There is no couch
“Ive never sat on a couch, I’m not that kind of person”
“Couches are for losers like Sleepy Biden Crime Family”
“I sat on alot of couches in the 90s with alot of people, it was a thing you did with people who wanted to know famous people”
“There is no such thing as a couch, and if there was I would totally direct my lawyers to sit, but there’s no couch”
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No no no, you’ve got it all wrong. J.D. Vance is the one who fucks couches.
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That’s lying with a couch
Unfortunately, many people are no longer smarter than their fridge. Even their fridge would not have voted for Donald Trump.
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Which is why fridges need to be built in the U.S., not South Korea. I mean, South Korea? Hello? Their president declared a national emergency in order to override existing laws, and the lawmakers (including those of his own party) went into parliament in spite of being blocked by the military and voted to remove him from office. His temporary replacement refused to have him criminally prosecuted and was removed as well.
Those people are serious about democracy. No wonder their fridges won’t vote for Trump. We cannot have them control the smart displays in patriotic kitchens.
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Well damn, nice to hear at least one country managed to stop their would-be dictator cold.
Damages?
What if the ads are promoting junk food and other stuff conflicting with the values and habits I try educating my kids with?
And wouldn’t Samsung open itself to class action lawsuits by obese people if they advertised food?
A Small Correction
The fridge gets sold but the software to operate it is licensed.
It is expensive to replace broken physical parts but relatively cheap to update the software (that creates income for the licensor). Externalising the costly part while keeping the cash-cow in house should sound familiar as a post-capitalist business model.
Who owns the fridge?
First, I suspect the owner would need to connect the fridge to the home wifi before it gets remotely updated. And because I can’t think of a legitimate reason to do so, there’s a bit on the owner.
But I’d love to see the contract for the purchase of the fridge. Is there a clause that says the space on the fridge containing the advertisements is still owned by Samsung? If not, I’d feel within my rights to send them an invoice for using my space for ads. Like if someone painted an ad on the side of my building, I’d charge them for the privilege. You know…if I actually owned a building. 😀
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Are you familiar with the concept of a smart fridge?
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The point of buying a fridge like this is specifically to use the internet to pull up recipes, shopping lists, etc. If somebody connects it to the internet, that doesn’t magically make it their fault this happened to them, they’re using it as intended. Samsung just decided to fuck with them because it’s a big corporation and it can.
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It’s not their fault there are ads. It’s their problem that they are idiotic enough to want “to pull up recipes, shopping lists, etc.” This is just stupid lazy shit. Get a piece of paper. You already have a phone anyway. And how the hell is it convenient to have recipes or shopping lists located on the fridge?
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That’s what the manufacturers advertise as “the point”. I suspect it’s bullshit, and maybe this advertising was the actual point.
I also wonder whether people are actually falling for the hype, or are just buying what’s available without really thinking about it. It’s, what, maybe a 50% chance that the fridge location makes the front a good place to show a recipe? In my case, it’d be totally unusable (it’s the side of the fridge that faces my preparation area).
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Smart fridges are intended to keep inventory as well I think, so the fridge can tell you what parts in the recipe you may still be missing, and it can order them with a delivery service if necessary.
Of course, keeping the fridge up to date will be much more work than just keeping tabs yourself. And delivery services for recipe components are a madness of dependencies, pricing, reliability and whatnot.
But that’s the sales pitch anyway.
Easy solution
Don’t let these types of devices have Internet access. Let them have only local LAN access only.
The manufacturer can’t change what they do if they dont have any access to connect to them in the first place.
More consumers need to fight back against mandatory requirement to have Internet registration for these types of things
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Umm… why? What possible benefit would I get from putting a fridge on my LAN but not on the internet?
So Samsung is a brand I should avoid. Noted.
Also, I can’t fathom why I’d want a fridge with a screen, much less with internet connection.
“But it can help you with stuff that you need to buy depending on what you want to cook and..” – No. Just no.
It’s dumb to buy smart. That’s why they sell so many.
Ad idea
If I’m GE or Whirlpool, I’d buy an ad that says we won’t do this crap to you on our products.
Samsung might not know it, but the first ad they show will be the best possible ad for their competitors.
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So what? They already got a brand new fridge with warranty. The only way the competition can profit from this disenchantment is if the fridge stops working in a manner not covered by warranty.
Like because of an axe through it.
The 'smart' choice is not to buy
Stories like this make all the more clear that you have to be pretty stupid to want a ‘smart’ device.
Inverted economics like TV's
You know the quote: “If you’re not paying for the product, you are the product”
Consider the “inverted economics” used by TV manufacturers whose surveillance strategy of collecting your data resulted in you getting a $5,000 HDTV deal for $500 at Walmart. By invading your living room, monitoring your behavior and habits, you willingly provide a lifetime value revenue stream. Could Samsung be on the path of selling millions of $500 smart surveillance refrigerators instead of just a few expensive $5,000 ice boxes?
What’s more, the declining compute cost of Artificial Intelligence means more analysis across more data sets meaning the value of fresh data will increase. Interconnections using Wi-Fi and Bluetooth will allow your TV, phone, computer, tablet, watch, smart home devices, and cloud services to monitor every part of your life. An ad on the fridge door will be so quaint.
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Except it’s more like getting a $600 TV for $500, if we’re being overly generous. The manufacturers’ own numbers suggest they’re selling their customers out really cheaply, like $10/year each or less. Roku make about $40/year/user, but they’re running a whole streaming platform from which they take cuts of subscription revenue; only a portion would come from selling customer data and/or advertisements.
Even Facebook’s (Meta’s) total annual revenue is only about $50 per account. In 2017, just $20 of that, per user, came from advertising.