Imagine paying top dollar for a brand-new high-end refrigerator only to be greeted with ads on the door display. Sounds like a nightmare? Unfortunately, this nightmare is coming true for Samsung refrigerator owners with the latest update rolling out to their fridges.
Imagine being dumb enough to buy a fridge with a screen in it, and then on top of that hooking it to the internet.
I could see a use for a screen on my fridge. Display my daily calendar, weather (I have a MagicMirror in my kitchen for this, but putting on the fridge would save space). However it needs to be for me, not for someone else.
There’s the problem. Ads are for the benefit of others.
@the_riviera_kid@lemmy.world @throws_lemy@lemmy.nz
Just like there are virtually no more brand-new non-smart TVs to be purchased (exceptions are getting increasingly rare), I can foresee a (not so distant) future where there are no more brand-new non-smart fridges, so consumers would need to purchase either the brand-new smart fridges, or trying to find increasingly-scarce used appliances (while they still work and can be fixed when they eventually get broken, because, you know, it relies on spare parts).
Also, I can see governments allied to corporation interests (it’s called “lobbying”) using the flag of “protecting the environment” (it’s called greenwashing and it got nothing to do with actually protecting the environment) to push laws requiring people to ditch their old appliances, similarly on how governments have been using the flag of “protecting the children” in order to push laws requiring people to disclose their faces/IDs to access anything they deem “adult” (not just adult entertainment).
For example: governments around the globe start decreeing “it’s now illegal to power on old refrigerators as they don’t meet the new environmental requirements”… we see how those laws spread across multiple countries, see this ID/face law: UK, then Australia, France, among other countries and some USian states.
And the same moral fallacy will happen if people started to complain about the ads on fridges: they’ll face something in the lines “Don’t you think of the environment? Are you pro-pollution?”. Again, it would have little (if anything) to do with environment (just like multi-national laws requiring ID for accessing internet content has little (if anything) to do with children), it’s just the frog used by scorpions.
Yeah. Future is made of big corporations (General Electric, Samsung, Google, Microsoft, etc) and governments (no matter their political leanings, for it’s just their current circensis to gaslight people), long married, seeing 1984 and Cyberpunk as handbooks.
Yet people attack other people (e.g. your statement that “dumb people buy a fridge with a screen in it” is an attack on other consumers as if they were the ones to blame for this problem in the first place) instead of pointing to the actual common threat.
You don’t have to connect these things to the internet. I have a smart tv and I use it to watch tv from another device. The smart tv isn’t connected to my network.
Just wait until only ad-serving devices get certified to connect via HDMI 5