CES Hands Out “Worst in Show” for Troubling Tech

The annual “Worst in Show” awards, a critical counterpoint to the celebratory fervor of the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, were announced by a coalition of leading consumer advocacy and privacy organizations—including representatives from iFixit, Consumer Reports, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation—to publicly shame what they deem the most irresponsible, invasive, and environmentally damaging products unveiled at the massive tech expo.

This year’s notorious anti-awards targeted a spectrum of concerning innovations, with the overall “Worst in Show” distinction going to Samsung’s “Bespoke AI Family Hub” refrigerator, a device lambasted not only for its unreliable voice-activated door controls that faltered in noisy environments but, more alarmingly, for embedding cameras and microphones within the home’s kitchen, creating unprecedented privacy vulnerabilities where hackers could potentially access intimate data about a family’s diet, health, and medication.

The “Worst in Show” for privacy was awarded to new features for Amazon’s Ring doorbell ecosystem, which critics argued fundamentally doubles down on creating pervasive, networked neighborhood surveillance that allows strangers and corporations to track comings and goings with chilling precision, eroding personal anonymity.

Further scorn was directed at an “AI Soulmate Companion” named Ami from Chinese company Lepro, derided as a dystopian and psychologically manipulative misuse of artificial intelligence that preys on loneliness, and at the Lollipop Star, a musical candy that uses bone-conduction technology for about an hour of playback before becoming irreparable electronic waste, earning it the environmental impact award for promoting a blatantly disposable and unsustainable consumer model.

The judging panel, led by figures like iFixit’s Director of Sustainability Elizabeth Chamberlain, explicitly stated their intent is not merely to mock but to apply public shame as a “poke” and an “impetus” for the entire industry to course-correct, using these specific products as emblematic case studies of broader, dangerous trends toward data exploitation, planned obsolescence, and solutions desperately in search of non-existent problems, in the hope that manufacturers will heed the critique and prioritize human-centric, private, and sustainable design in the future.