I never disagreed with this. My point is, performing a return is a strong signal of dislike. Box stores hate returns as do online sellers. Failing anything else (because face it, ranting about it on the internet and pointing out the moral failures of a business model is not doing it) returning it is the best you can do.

People are also unlikely to return because they don't realize tracking exists. The iPhone permissions is a perfect example of this. People "knew" these apps were tracking them but didn't internalize them. When the UI changed to better highlight the tracking people did internalize it and denied it.

At the end of the day it's a team of psychologists, computer scientists, and super computers against one human. It's not a fair fight. There are plenty of dark patterns to make you not internalize the tracking. So while you're technically right, no one expects to see this happen in practice because your model isn't accounting for this.

You can actually measure time in dollars pretty often. And with all the time spent you mentioned for returning an item like this that time is likely as expensive as the printer itself.

It's not spying, it's a mutual agreement, you deliberately accepted the terms and installed the app yourself.

Are you suggesting that an app that is purported to help you interact with your printer, but does not do that very well, but does track literally everything it can about you instead so that the parent company can sell that information, is not spying? That is deceptive.

I think people are conflating my interpretation of personal agency with agreeing with the practice; I don't buy products that do these things, I'm merely explaining that by using this item and agreeing to their terms, it is in fact not spying, because you're informed ahead of time what will happen. Someone not reading the contracts they sign does not void the terms of the contracts.

> Someone not reading the contracts they sign does not void the terms of the contracts.

In some cases, it does. In medical trials, you need "informed consent", and not just regular consent. It doesn't matter what papers are signed, if a patient isn't informed what the trial is testing, what known side effects there are, and what alternatives there are, it doesn't count.

More relevant to this issue, GDPR also uses the concept of informed consent. Under GDPR, tracking is legal only if consent is informed and freely given. The example printer fails both these conditions. It is not informed consent, because the tracking is not prominently disclosed to the user, and merely mentioning it in the fine print is insufficiently prominent. It is not freely-given consent, because a service being conditional on acceptance of tracking means that there is coercion to accept the tracking.

My viewpoint on the ethics tends to follow somewhat close to the GDPR's requirements. Even if somebody clicked through a 50-page EULA, that does not give informed permission to track somebody, and so it is still spying.