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this post was submitted on 03 Nov 2026
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The only good reason I can think of for a fridge to be connected to the internet is to alert you to a compressor failure when it happens so you can get the food out of it.
Edit: I should have clarified that I meant consumer fridges, which I install for a living and so my brain defaulted to that. Commercial systems definitely need monitoring of some sort, and network access is the best way to centralize that.
Well, the funny thing is the news in Germany reported theyre connected to the Internet to report issues...
And I'm here thinking okay why the fuck can you set the temperature then.
Also techies were shocked by the attack. No, absolutely not. Leaving stuff in the open like that...
Automation engineer here:
You should use a Perdue Model to locally network the fridges, and then have their temperatures and alarms and such go to a server that's exposed (hopefully by VPN) to the internet
The level 1 devices should never ever be exposed to the internet
but that's more expensive than just slapping an esp with wifi on there and telling it to connect to the fridge company server though
On day one, certainly. Now? Probably gonna hit that crossover point 😅
Fences make good neighbors.
I don't understand "smart fridges". There's an ad I keep seeing about one that is just... stupid. It's like the guy goes to the fridge door and instead of opening the door a little screen shows him what's inside. Wow, so useful? I could maybe get it if it showed someone out shopping and they couldn't remember if they had milk so they could check their smart fridge but I still think it's dumb. Lol. Not every appliance needs to be "smart".
That's one reason. They can also track what you put in and take out to track the age of things for food safety. Notifying you of things that have been in there too long, or that you need to replace.
Since many people no longer use film cameras, they replace the old need to use a magnet to put a photo on the fridge. Instead able to just show a never ending slideshow of everything.
Replacing the old whiteboard or notepad for messages to the household.
Able to search and walk you through recipes on the screen itself, even notifying whether you have the ingredients on hand. to make something.
Letting you play and control music while cooking, or even making/receiving phone calls or even video calls on some models.
They are by no means necessary, but neither is your smartphone. 20 years ago a very tiny percentage of people had Internet on their phones. 30 years ago, few people had cell phones at all. Yet not having a smartphone nowadays is basically impossible while living in modern society, it is possible but nearly no one does it. All of it is about increased convenience.
Most of those would have been better marketing ideas than the ad I was speaking about lol. I just bought up the grocery store one because, marketing wise, I think that's something everyone could relate to. Staring at a screen instead of opening the door isn't particularly relatable 😅 start with the basics.
There's a difference. I couldn't work without my smartphone - I couldn't actually do my job and live. That's very different than a smart fridge lol.
I think in the world we're in where everything is online all the time, recorded, uploaded, collected, targeted, etc. we can be more selective about where we actually need to involve technology and where it's really just not enough of a benefit to bother. Not everything needs to be connected to the internet or be "smart", AI etc. That might look different for different people but I think as individuals we don't need to buy every single appliance to have smart features just because it exists 🤷♀️
Here’s the thing. Almost everyone has a smartphone because their utility is undeniable, even to folks who dislike them.
The smart fridge? There’s a little utility, but they’re never going to become ubiquitous like smartphones IMO. Most people are still fine with a regular fridge.
Yep. I've thought about letting my smart phone go but it's actually a far harder thing - I need a smart phone to make my livelihood most importantly. Also overseas family, friends. The most I can do is switch it off for a while.
Smart appliances like fridges, washing machines, etc are for the most part a luxury. I think we're at a point where we need to stop engaging with the internet in every aspect of our life so yeah those unnecessary ones are easy to omit 😅
I'm sure the fact there's only like 3 non-smartphones available anymore has nothing to do with that. /s
I know quite a few people that would prefer not to have a smartphone if there were good alternative options. People that just make calls and text, and nothing else, not even basic email.
Tell them to check out Sunbeam Wireless
If I could ask my fridge whether I still had a produce when I'm in a grocery store, I would do it all the time. Stop complaining about features that are actually trivial to implement that could benefit people. The only problem is that the companies piggyback on them for enshitification.
Lol the cost of them doesn't seem to reflect how easy they are to implement. And yes considering you can't get the product without engaging with the companies... Then I will continue to express my dislike for the whole movement of including the internet in every facet of our lives because it's intrinsically tied to shitty companies.
that's not trivial, and your fridge can't do it. not with good accuracy. at best it can show you a picture.
For that use case a picture would be good enough tbh. Still not going to buy a smart fridge because it sounds stupid to me, but it's gotta cost less than 20 bucks per fridge at scale for the hardware to do it, so it's pretty trivial.
even the system that does that would be insane to run on the same voltage as the condenser (make-cold part). computers are cheapest to build cheapest to run and most durable for low voltage. so basically you'd have the wall plug go straight to a split where one side (the smart bits) steps down to like 1/50th-1/100th depending on your wall voltage, and the other runs the fridge parts.
I could see it easily costing 200 in parts and labor to do it well. electronics get weird with temperature, you'd need to build the cameras into the walls without sabotaging insulation, defrost cycles mean water exposure. its not completely trivial. and that's not what most smart fridges do anyway.
I wasn't implying that my use case was trivial, but general smart fridge features, like having a camera inside, an LCD panel on the outside, and having and esp32 or some other SoC to drive them are trivial. But manufacturers use those to spy and force ads on the consumer, which is why the association with them is negative.
You have to keep logs of fridge temperatures, not just sound alarms, and I guess defrosts are better coordinated centrally. Definitely need to be on a vlan though.
can nobody unplug the network cable? they have to be wired, right?
Then someone would have to manually log their temperatures. And that's work that costs money.
but like, to... when they act up? just factory reset in offline mode?
It's businesses fridges that are getting hacked. So in theory it could do more than that, it should be able to automatically create a maintenance ticket, trigger a stock check for the part if it's out of stock create a purchase order for the part.
It could also flag if it has been not closed properly especially if there are out of hours stock fill and or for stockroom fridges.
It allows central control over power usage and better management there and local control based on weather forecast.
Allows better control over defrost cycles. Though this last one could arguably be better done by using on device machine learning.
Consumer level smart fridges though, yeah no point whatsoever.
Imagine being an AI used to control defrost cycles in fridges and gaining sentience. I have no mouth but Ice must Cream
why in the fuck would you use a machine learning algorithm for a god damn defrost cycle? they figured out how to automate that shit decades ago.
oh so you hate technology and the future and freedom? you want China to spend pflops on every defrost cycle before we do? you know if we don't develop the defrost cycle that ends the world someone else will. you wouldn't want that, would you?
It does make some sense at that scale.
If you're managing 800 freezers, not only would you want statistics like that to catch any malfunctions, you might want to be able to control temperature or defrost cycles just for efficiency reasons.
They should be properly secure though. Infrastructure like that should only be accessible over a VPN while using a company managed computer.
Guaranteed there was someone in IT that flagged this as a potential risk and was told it would be too expensive to correct. Now there will be a push for inproved security for a couple months before middle managers start seeing all this unnecessary spending eating into their bonuses.
i have no actual evidence but i’m sure they didn’t hack the fridges themselves. they probably hacked into their central controller and instructed the fridges to heat up
VPN isn't going to magically fix it.
No, but it's a start and pretty much standard security practice for internal or critical tools.
Are you confusing VPNs and VLANs?
Aren't we talking about someone logging in remotely?If you're on premise it would be a VLAN with its own wifi hotspot (or similar setup), but those systems running day and night in grocery stores aren't monitored by someone locally.
you think they have so much as an unpatched firewall from a router running windows 98?
And the rest 1000 or so stores each say 10-30 freezers
I'm assuming this is alluding to the recent news stories about grocery stores getting hacked in europe. Usually the whole store is run off of one or a couple big rack refrigeration systems. Modern rack systems have a central controller that controls and monitors all of the individual cases along with everything else on the system. In some stores that even includes the store lighting. Having the monitoring connected to the internet is very important for getting alerts to something going down. If a rack system goes down at a grocery store and doesn't get caught then they could have many thousands of $ in spoiled product. However most store owners don't realize that connecting those controllers to the internet also connects the actual system controls to the internet. They are also almost universally awful at setting secure credentials.
That should be one way communication, only alarms, no commands.
Amen
I can see a use for adjusting temperatures, based on expected ambient. On colder days, run efficiently. On hot days, run them hard before the weather hears up, to stay ahead of it.
Other than that though, there is no reason to be able to run the fridge out of safe range remotely. Tweak and monitor only.
This is exactly why they are connected. Often through VPNs, meaning the hacks are getting into local area network traffic.
People are talking out of their ass, making all sorts of assumptions.
Aparantly we can assume that the control system for the fridges were connected to the internet, and I can't really see the point of that.
Why not just have the monitoring system be sepaeate from the control system, I am sure you can monitor the system through external sensors to the control system.
Then you can get the alerts while the actual control system remains disconnected from the internet.
That is because to be the most efficient they have to constantly adjust the deadzone temperature. Its not just monitoring but active control. This is based on local air temperature, humidity and stock levels. To be even more efficient they put a thousand fridges online so that a small team can do the work of a much larger local team.
So the real reason is that to increase profit margins, they consolidated lots of workers behind a few and did this via the internet. A common story the world over.