Samsung Family Hub for 2025 Update Elevates the Smart Home Ecosystem
Postedabout 2 months agoActiveabout 2 months ago
news.samsung.comTechstoryHigh profile
heatednegative
Debate
90/100
Smart HomeIOTData PrivacyAdvertising
Key topics
Smart Home
IOT
Data Privacy
Advertising
Samsung's new Family Hub fridge update includes ads and data collection, sparking outrage among HN users who criticize the company's focus on profit over user experience and privacy.
Snapshot generated from the HN discussion
Discussion Activity
Very active discussionFirst comment
25m
Peak period
148
0-6h
Avg / period
26.7
Comment distribution160 data points
Loading chart...
Based on 160 loaded comments
Key moments
- 01Story posted
Nov 9, 2025 at 10:18 AM EST
about 2 months ago
Step 01 - 02First comment
Nov 9, 2025 at 10:43 AM EST
25m after posting
Step 02 - 03Peak activity
148 comments in 0-6h
Hottest window of the conversation
Step 03 - 04Latest activity
Nov 11, 2025 at 2:35 PM EST
about 2 months ago
Step 04
Generating AI Summary...
Analyzing up to 500 comments to identify key contributors and discussion patterns
ID: 45866165Type: storyLast synced: 11/20/2025, 8:18:36 PM
Want the full context?
Jump to the original sources
Read the primary article or dive into the live Hacker News thread when you're ready.
In plain English now, Samgung will put advertising on your face but mostly important is that they will know and sell the data about what you buy.
They call it Smart Home. Yeah, "smart". They are the smart ones, not those who buy this **.
Edit: I checked because one shouldn't be outraged without fact checking. It's true.
If you are not elevating the privacy of me and my family, CORPORATRON can suck it.
I will spend my money to elevate the sales of a company that respects privacy instead.
Is there such a thing?
Someone my spouse knows recently bought one of the $3500 models that’s getting this, and said person was in the “test” group for the rollout. Their response to the situation has been that they won’t buy Samsung appliances ever again.
So if enough of us do that. Maybe.
> As part of the Family Hub™ software update, we are piloting a new widget for select Cover screens themes of Family Hub™ refrigerators. The widget will display useful day-to-day information such as news, calendar and weather forecasts, along with curated advertisements
"Shop Samsung Water Filters - Subscribe and Save 40%"
"[11] Ads on Family Hub Cover screens will serve contextual or non-personal ads. Family Hub devices are not collectiong personal information or tracking consumers."
So you absolutely don't want any Samsung appliances, even the non 'smart' ones.
In my market Samsung has driven away all the service techs. We managed to find one, and he said he only works on Samsung because it’s a captive market now. He complained that Samsung micromanages field services to a degree that they’re killing the service ecosystem for their appliances.
We had him try to fix an issue with a dryer. On his way out he looked at the fridge and said “has the ice maker stopped working yet?” It actually had stopped working a year earlier. We didn’t get it fixed then because Samsung didn’t have anyone to send, and there were no third parties we could find (even unauthorized).
We’ve been replacing all our appliances with other brands.
Edit: PS - depending on the model of fridge, the ice maker infrastructure (typically near the filter) eventually start pooling water and might freeze in inconvenient places. Watch out for that. YMMV.
Still a great computer but $7500 for something that kills itself 3 times in 3.5 years sucks. Luckily it's a company computer and they're giving me a m4 max
Recent rant in a similar thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45740274
New rant:
As I said, the phone restarted itself to upgrade and disabled the notifications until I loged in again. I could have missed some important stuff, but I notice it before it caused a problem.
So I went to the configuration and disable automatic upgrades.
Now I get a notification that ask me to restart to upgrade, and say that if I accept it will be restarted automatically next time. (And it's very easy to press that button by mistake.)
And there is an annoying that each week tells me if I used the phone 5 minuthe more than the previous week, and is magical and impossible to turn off.
So in US you pay a thousand more for a fridge that shows advertisement?
We had a Samsung dishwasher before. It was about 500 euros and started leaking water after five years. Now we have an expensive Miele which was about thousand euros. Seems that they don't share the same issue.
Also, I assume you can still do what I did for my current LG TV, skip the wifi setup, plug in AppleTV and use it purely as dumb TV.
Then the advertisers could buy more accurate information to improve product placement in movies/tv shows.
The sci-fi version could be a TV that can recognize what kind of things are in the room or clues for the viewer's socioeconomic status and emotional state to bring up content (or even change it in real time) to maximize resonance with the viewer.
I worked with IoT devices, generally the cost per GB of data is around dollar per GB. I doubt you would make that back in advertisements.
Also, there is cost per SIM so you wouldn't want situation where SIM is active if you don't need it which is why alot of IoT devices have you setup with a phone because they turn SIM on when you sign up for their plan. If consumer never puts TV on Wi-Fi network or cooperates with the phone, then you would have keep each SIM active and turn it off when it checks in via Wi-Fi. My guess is cost is not worth it if you get 98% cooperation. Write off 2% and call it a day.
I get that, but at some point you're installing it in your house with non-color corrected lighting and viewing it during the daytime with your terrible human eyes. I get why 200-300 lumens of peak brightness can make a difference, but does 2-3% of color correctness really matter to people as they watch their low bitrate netflix stream?
Maybe we'd all be better off if we calmed down a bit on chasing the specs, and focused on something else for a while.
Sigh. Where's the video equivalent of music stores for "just let me buy a high-quality DRM-free download I actually own" already?
All tvs from all manufacturers have microphones and they do listen an sell info.
Everyone things Facebook is listening but it really is your tv.
You can refuse to give them a direct WiFi connection, but just wait until they start using IOT mesh networks like Amazon Sidewalk as a fallback channel (assuming some aren't quietly doing that already).
There are settings… deep, deep, hard to find settings.
In 2030, it will be "Well, the TV sends a 24/7 video of my living room to Samsung, plays a 5 minute ad every 10 minutes of content, displays in 480i unless I pay a $100/mo subscription, and it will kill my pets, but hey, it has the best display in the world, so I'm thinking about buying it."
Also random features require you to be logged in to a Samsung account on the TV. Like picture-in-picture for instance.
I'm considering refunding it, but it has absolutely brilliant picture quality though.
..and fucking bricked my phone. Right there on the spot in the middle of a sale.
Plus the whole Tizen situation on the Gear watches was incredibly disappointing. I paid all kinds of money for a nice watch that had zero utility outside of Samsung's tiny, tiny walled garden and their very few, very broken apps. I'll never not be mad about it.
The problem is that even if you can amass such an IOT botnet, you still need people on the ground to conduct such burglaries, and that scales poorly. Even if you tried to operate on a SaaS model, you're going to find that your clients (ie. drug users who want their next fix) are fickle and are very eager to snitch on you to the police, making it very likely that your botnet gets dismantled. On the other hand running a DDoS or "residential proxy" botnet comes with none of these hassles.
Also, while "smart" Samsung fridges are the topic of this article, the concept generalizes to any internet connected devices within "smart" homes which exhibit a combination of "hackable" and revealing-of-occupancy. Samsung refrigerators are unlikely to be the most attractive vector when there are e.g. "smart" light bulbs out there which are vulnerable and never going to be patched because the manufacturer went out of business.
FWIW, I'm not a pen tester or security specialist — just a security-conscious generalist software developer. I see evidence left behind of scanning attacks in web logs, but haven't actually crafted such mass attacks myself.
> Please connect the Samsung^R Family^tm H.U.B.^TM^R to the internet to continue the refrigeration cycle. You refrigeration cycle will end in 28 hours unless reconnected to the Samsung^TM KNOX^R Server System for your security
> Please reposition the Samsung^R Family^tm H.U.B.^TM^R so that 6G Connectivity can be established to start the refrigeration cycle.
> Please unblock all visual obstructions the Samsung^R Family^tm H.U.B.^TM^R Camera and reauthorize usage to continue the refrigeration cycle.
> Please unblock all visual obstructions the Samsung^R Family^tm H.U.B.^TM^R Camera and Reauthorize using your government ID, fingerprint, iris scan and cryptographically singed anus print to continue usage. Failure to comply will cost you 25 Social Credits. You have 27 hours left.
Caution, incoming naive comment(s): Companies should put their customer's well being before profits, because we all know most people don't understand what's going on with their digital devises. (Yes, customers should care more, but companies shouldn't be allowed to take advantage of those who can't grasp the techiness of the products.) Techiness, I just made that up. :)
This might be illegal for publicly traded companies. Shareholder maximization forces them to deceive their customers.
If you wanna skip some chapters and see where all of this ends up, go check out how Unity is doing after John Riccitiello fucked them.
But the comment above me argued "Companies should put their customer's well being before profits" which as a general statement may VERY well fall under my argument.
The reality is that i believe shareholder value optimization and unregulated capitalism is the problem.
This is nothing more than a myth.
https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-are-co...
https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/tovala
A SMART-OVEN-PAIRED SUBSCRIPTION MEAL SERVICE.
If I only did it where everyone agrees with me it'd be a waste of time, of which none of us have very much.
I was guilty of it myself at times during my career, but luckily I was able to retire just before things started to get unavoidably shitty.
We need a law that requires IoT devices have a method of shutting off connectivity entirely, and requiring that core functionality remains intact.
I can't always avoid the latter category on principle.
I wouldn't consider buying a smart/Samsung refrigerator at all but I'm curious, is having blockchain, AI, and a Samsung account mandatory here? Or do they allow for discerning users who don't want that stuff? Is that market segment important to them?
No, it is not. Cheaper fridges with ads sell more and make more.
They’re so deep in advertising that the only feature they can think their customers are interested in are related to seeing ads.
The type of corpo-speak that gives an mba a rock hard erection.
Vulgar jokes aside, I want to know who is buying ads on fridges and what the roas on a fridge ad is.
Who knows, really? But maybe the same people who put ads on the gas station pumps that I use?
Those things blare at max volume and I still have no idea what they're selling.
Amusing anecdote: About 60 years ago, my grandfather (immigrant who was not well versed in mass-production) wrote a letter to the local newspaper asking that they omit the advertisements when they built his copy of the paper. "I never read them" he said.
My mother had to explain to him how his copy was gonna be just like everyone else's.
It’s way too frequent and runs at random times in the middle of a movie so I always choose Accept.
Give me a dumb TV any time of the day now
This works until apple enshitifies
Anyone who see anything other than enshittification is living on the same month-to-month timeline that capitalism wants in their consumers.
In my experience, they've been fine for a few years so far.
Unless you have root and can do anything the hardware is capable of, it's not your device. And you shouldn't let any sort of non-owned devices on your network.
Why? Cause devices controlled by other orgs are a foothold situation. And we've had countless attacks of footholds being used as internal points of attack, DDoS, and other attacks.
That also means that all your "cloud devices" should be able to work 100% offline. If not, return them as defective.
Devices that do need to be on the internet but I can foresee no reason they ever need to talk to anything else on the network go on their own VLAN (down to the level of my VR headset since it had a Meta logo on the box...).
My boys gaming PC can't even see my desktop (since there isn't a scenario where it needs to).
Other than the "smart" TV I own nothing "Smart" because I don't want anything smart.
I am adverse to being trapped with rental hardware masquerading as as 'sale'. Almost all corporate cloudshit is that.
As a counter example, I have 2 of these opengarage for my garage doors. They work superbly and integrate seamlessly with HomeAssistant.
https://opengarage.io/
And yes, I control them completely. FLOSS and all. And they just work.
Their smart TV stuff used to be marginally interesting. When Samsung TV Plus launched it was fantastic. They weren’t yet sure of how to handle ads so even the ad space was still nice, and marginally useful.
As they figured out the ad strategy, apps started disappearing and new ones appeared that couldn’t be uninstalled.
Then the OS updates started cratering performance. I have a Samsung smart TV from after 2020 that takes about 4 seconds to register a single remote control command in the smart TV GUI.
Moral of the story is... always double check your router settings to make sure enshittified iot devices aren't making you look like a newb.
Well the real question is why would you buy a connected fridge in the first place. Not that I visit fridges alleys in stores on a regular basis but I have never actually seen one.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45867034
> Which open wifi network are left in residencial neighborhood?
Some neighborhoods are mixed use. Some residences are in dense buildings. Some people configured guest networks with no password. Some ISPs made their home gateways captive portal access points.
I would never run an open network on my home connection, there are way too many legal risks unless you can log who is connect to it and when.
It’s getting so you don’t have a real choice. You can buy a fridge (or any appliance pretty much) that is basic and doesn’t do the connected thing. But often you want the upscaled models because of real hardware features that are desirable. And these are always bundled with the “connectivity” options. It used to be you just ignored these bits. But they’re getting more and more invasive.
delaminator asked what hardware features could not be lived without.
fragmede listed desired hardware features.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQTIuX84ids
It has a large Android tablet in the front door, so it can show you ads – coming soon.
most updates are downgrades in my experience unless it addresses something very specific
Block it entirely, and hope it that doesn't connect to your Samsung phone via Bluetooth or WiFi and use it as a proxy.
Even if you don't suspect malfeasance / advertising / surveillance, a lot of these devices and their software are sloppily developed and highly insecure
This is so annoying, Amazon did it with Kindle, now Samsung with fridges?!
155 more comments available on Hacker News