No fan of the internet of shit here or anything, but I don't think these aspects of the firmware will get any more nefarious. The other terrible things about smart home devices are already well-known.
As usual, I just recommend sticking to only smart home equipment that can work over local radio or some other bus that's not internet connected. Strongly recommend people check out home assistant; for moderate power users it's pretty easy to wrangle a bunch of Bluetooth LE, ZigBee and Zwave devices. I can find off the shelf Zwave devices at my local Lowe's and ZigBee at my local Best Buy (Philips Hue devices work fine for me out of the box.) Of course, when it comes to ovens, you're probably shit out of luck. But whatever. Not sure what serious value add a radio on an oven adds. Guess you can see the timer from the couch...
I'll be keeping my Samsung appliances off the network personally. No real need for whatever SmartThings might offer anyways.
I agree its probably benign, but its really hard to trust companies these days to do the right thing. Consumers are basically being treated as sheep to be sheared.
As usual, I just recommend sticking to only smart home equipment that can work over local radio or some other bus that's not internet connected. Strongly recommend people check out home assistant; for moderate power users it's pretty easy to wrangle a bunch of Bluetooth LE, ZigBee and Zwave devices. I can find off the shelf Zwave devices at my local Lowe's and ZigBee at my local Best Buy (Philips Hue devices work fine for me out of the box.) Of course, when it comes to ovens, you're probably shit out of luck. But whatever. Not sure what serious value add a radio on an oven adds. Guess you can see the timer from the couch...
I'll be keeping my Samsung appliances off the network personally. No real need for whatever SmartThings might offer anyways.