I have a Samsung fridge. It’s not a smart fridge, it doesn’t have a screen, bluetooth, or any way to connect to it.
I logged into my UniFi stack to monitor devices and it showed up. It had gotten the connection details from my wife’s phone, the other Samsung device and was transmitting data back to Google and Samsung.
The far more likely explanation is that your unifi dashboard's device identification logic is broken and is misreporting the device. Otherwise it doesn't make sense for samsung to engage it a massive conspiracy of putting wifi hardware in non-smart devices (driving up the BOM cost), creating a massive botnet that can share credentials between devices, all so they can... maybe run a residential proxy network? Then subsequently detected by anyone who looks at their device list.
Even if you think they're running some sort of massive botnet, the fridge being part of it is still implausible. They probably have billions of phones and tablets alone, plenty enough to scrape/DDoS the entire internet several times over. There's no need to add clandestine hardware into non-smart fridges.
It’s really not that far fetched. What led me to investigate was that I got a Samsung 49” smart monitor, my wife left the kitchen door open and it displayed alerts on my monitor.
UniFi is not misrepresenting the device ID; while you’re right that happens. It didn’t here.
The Mac ID is 1c:e8:9e:3d:c4:ad and is registered to SJIT who makes IOT Devices Samsung and smart fridges.
I appreciate your skepticism, but the device is still connected to my WiFi. It has been since 2024, the Mac ID has not changed nor has its identification. I’ve also done packet tracing to determine it IS in fact the smart fridge.
As for the “clandestine hardware to non-smart fridges”. Streamlining of production lines is nothing new. Being able to datamine people’s networks is worth the 20$ hardware chip.
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What model of fridge?! How did you know the random device on your network was your non-smart fridge? This is a wild story. I want to believe but if it's true I think there's no sane solution other than exploratory surgery on every appliance you buy.
I don’t recall the model. I had bought a new Samsung Monitor, my wife left the fridge door open and it had started alerting on my monitor while I was in game.
So I went digging in UniFi, found it, and blocked it. Same with my HP Printer that sent almost a gig of data to Google Print Services daily.