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I use an air fryer a lot and I'm on my fifth one. The first four were high tech and didn't last long, mostly less than a year. I figured if I was going to keep buying them it was time to go cheap so they were less painful to replace, plus I don't use the fancy features. So I got one with hardly any features, just a knob for temperature and a kind of built in mechanical egg timer for time.

But it didn't work out as planned because this cheap model has outlasted all of the expensive ones put together. It's on year five of multiple daily uses. Same happened with sous vide circulators. Now I go for the cheap and simple gadgets first. No apps, no mic, no wifi or Bluetooth, and better for it.

Exactly because I work in tech for a couple of decades that I avoid any smart appliance. I do not need my dishwasher, washing machine, dryer, coffee maker, rice cooker, stove, refrigerator, etc. to be connected to the internet to provide a "smart" feature which is just a timer, while adding to the noise of notifications. The only need I have is that they work dependably whenever I need them, at most with a timer so I can check when electricity will be cheaper and program them to turn on at that time.

My coffee maker is a sturdy Technivorm Moccamaster, the blender is a Vitamix from the 90s that still work flawlessly, dishwasher, dryer and washing machine early 2010s Bosch and Miele. They all work exactly as they are supposed to, never had to do anything more than cleaning/upkeep.

A few friends bought newly built apartments with smart fridges, washers, etc. installed by the developers, and all of them had some issue with appliances on the first couple years residing in these homes.

Clickbait title. It is not the airfrier spying. It is the unified app on the phone that asks for the permissions that it needs for all potential appliances it can manage.

I guess "apps on your phone can listen in and track you" hasn't the same OMG factor.

Companion apps are part of the product as far as I'm concerned. There would be no reason to run the app, other than owning one of the coupled air fryers.
> There would be no reason to run the app, other than owning one of the coupled air fryers.

Maybe so. But the converse is not true. For me personally, owning the air fryer does not give me any reason to give a rip about running the app. (Others may have different tastes.)

If I like the air fryer, why do I care that an app I won't run would spy on me?

> Three air fryers, made by the Chinese brands Xiaomi, Tencent and Aigostar, wanted to record audio on their owner's phone for no specified reason

> Meanwhile, smart TVs made by Hisense and Samsung which were tested by Which? asked for people's postcodes during set-up. Samsung's TV app also asked for permission to be able to see all the other apps on the user's phone.

Information is the valuable bit here, the devices themselves don't produce enough value as they can be sold only once.

Data can be sold multiple times.

Which? is a UK brand, and in the UK it's fairly common to see the postcode (or rather the first couple of digits) used to determine which regional programming a user wants, given the (to some extent historical) TV regions and channel numbering.

I've seen "always offline" pre internet era satellite TV set top boxes do this, and use the first 2 or 3 characters of the postcode to work out the correct region and show the correct programme guide information and channel numbering.

I imagine that on a modern internet enabled device this might also pre-select some of the "watch later" apps, based on your region.

Doesn't mean there's no wider issue about data gathering and exfiltration over the internet, but just to add some regional context as this postcode point might not be as egregious as it sounds at first.

I was looking into air-fryers recently and found that they all use a non-stick coating (which makes sense, given how they work) and almost all of them use PTFE.

Now, with an air-fryer, I guess, the overheating risk is much lower than with a non-stick pan but there is still the issue that the surface will likely get scratched over time.

I am curious if others consider this a problem and if there are alternatives I missed during my search?

> Meanwhile, smart TVs made by Hisense and Samsung which were tested by Which? asked for people's postcodes during set-up.

I would guess that they would then sell that information along with the IP address to a company such as Maxmind who make IP location databases

related:

hacked-from-china-is-your-kettle-spying-on-you https://www.cbsnews.com/news/hacked-from-china-is-your-kettl...

china-could-spy-millions-britons-household-objects-like-fridges https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/01/23/china-could-spy-...

XD

The Chinese twist always seems a bit forced to me. I have been spied upon my entire life by American companies and by the American government. I do not live in America.

It’s weird to compare the potential threat of Chinese spying to the ongoing reality of American spying.

I’m not validating the automatic anti-China sentiment you can sometimes get in these discussions, but there is a major difference between the two. If you live in any mainstream European, or for simplicity’s sake, ‘Western’ country, regardless of your feelings towards U.S. intelligence gathering, these are political allies who share intelligence as a matter of course anyway. China is an actively hostile power who just recently penetrated the domestic U.S. phone network.

Obviously skepticism on this topic is a generally good thing, but I think nihilism to the point that one thinks the U.S. is no different to China, Russia or North Korea is neither accurate nor particularly helpful.

This makes some sense from a state's perspective.

As an individual I am more concerned about the spying that is effectively hostile to me personally. As a Westerner, I am fairly certain that this will be Western spying. I would expect a Chinese person to be more concerned with Chinese spying for the same reason.

Political allies or not, the US has been caught spying on us just the same.[0] US companies constantly spy on EU citizens and use the data they illegally collect to influence our habits. While I don't fear a military conflict with the United States, there is an ongoing threat of having our elections, our culture, and our purchasing habits influenced by US businesses.

I'm not saying that the US is no different from China. I am saying that unlike the Chinese threat, the threat of spying from the US government and US businesses has been going on for a while already.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_espionage_in_Germany

How do you see that China is an actively hostile power?
I knew it!

Everything … all my kitchen appliances have been listening to me.

They talk behind my back.

This proves the government knows.

They know. The do experiments in Roswell. Area 54.