In many cases this would thoroughly annoy certain authoritarian regimes that are normalised as totalitarian surveillance states. Their exports would be disrupted. What a pity.
TVs are used by multiple people too so how does that even track legally.
My partners will fly through menus agreeing to everything if I'm not there.
I'm using a universal remote that doesn't have a microphone and it complains about that too.
Sometimes during software updates, this pairing is broken, and it never tells me that the pairing has been removed, and never forces me to pair the remote.
My next TV will be a big monitor.
If you want to modify GP’s proposal to exclude things that also have a service, how long until DJI adds a service to their drone? (It might even be a negative duration; I don’t own one, but it would shock me if there wasn’t some kind of service associated already, perhaps to prevent flying a drone in unauthorized areas [or justified as such] or allow access to some online component of camera service.)
You should be able to use your phone and install software on it without signing up for the sellers services, I think there is no reason to not allow that except evil lockin.
See windows for what happens when you don't legally enforce that, its ridiculous windows forces you to sign up to their services.
And that of course is also why this only happens via regulation.
And computers. Sure it's a good idea to have a password, but that's not the same as a user ID registered with a company.
The small claims courts solution of course not everybody has the time or resources to do that, so the company wins that way.
We need new regulations that stops it before it gets to the point where you have to go to small claims court or class action to redress the wrong.
When people are speeding, you don’t need individuals to sue them in small claims court to enforce the speed limit. Having that requirement for consumer goods is bizarre.
The even worse outcome of failing to protect the consumer at the point of sale is you’ve tacitly swallowed the tenets of an authoritarian surveillance state.
I bought an android phone that worked and soon it will reset every 3 days, so Im unreachable unless I enter the PIN. What kills the idea of having a secondary phone just in case.
I think that can be disabled, though. I know of a couple of folks that won’t even enable Face ID. I think that’s insane. The phone has our entire life on it. The thought of having that much information available to any pickpocket is sobering.
I refuse to use custom apps for things like banking and store loyalty, etc. I keep a photo of my store loyalty card’s barcode in my Photos app, because it does get me significant discounts, occasionally, but I won’t install their app.
Most of these custom apps seem to be pretty shoddy quality, in my opinion (I’m a snob, though. Many folks don’t seem to mind). They seem to be written with some kind of hybrid system, and some are little more than webviews.
> Enables a future optional security feature, which will automatically restart your device if locked for 3 consecutive days.
https://support.google.com/product-documentation/answer/1434... (archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20250421103659/https://support.g...)
In few months the option will just disappear?
Disabling the PIN reduces security (what kind of "hacker" gives such bad advice?).
I bet we wont be able to disable that feature in few months.
Pain in the butt with work phone too - take 3 day holidays and it stopps working.
Bad feature created by people who dont think.
Yeah yeah, survivor bias, rose tinted glasses, conspiracy theories, blah blah. I've heard all the canned refutations. It's true. Appliance manufacturers got better at making things worse.
And even if the device doesn't die early, it will eventually have to be replaced for one reason or another. I got 20 years out of my Honda, which wasn't great but not terrible either, but trying to replace it with something new that had comparable reputation for reliability and also no touch screen computer spyware bullshit was a serious problem. My only choice was Mazda and the although my new car does have the physical buttons and knobs I want, they are easily the worst quality buttons and knobs. All mushy with no satisfying clicks. One company holding out and selling cars or appliances without the new horse shit isn't enough, because without comparable competition they are still free to cut corners and make something worse than could be purchased in the past.
A few years later all microwaves had chiclet keypads with terrible user interfaces. They’ve improved from there over the years but never to the convenience of the original knob layout.
I put whatever leftovers in there. Pasta, chicken and rice, soups, BBQ, doesn't matter. I lightly cover it. Press Reheat. Perfect every time. I don't have to judge how much to turn two knobs.
Same goes for potatoes. Stab it with a fork a few times, butter and salt the outside, toss them in and press "Potato". Perfect baked potato every time.
Same goes for steaming veggies. Frozen or fresh, doesn't matter. Toss them in a bowl, put a bit of water/butter/seasonings in it, lightly cover, press Vegetable, and boom perfectly steamed veggies.
The one-touch sensor modes on my microwave are fantastic. And this is a 20-year-old microwave, so it's not like adding this tech made it less reliable. I'll be sad if I ever need to have a different microwave.
I've only ever left the how high on high, and the time is 3 minutes for chilled, 10 for frozen. so in a way I agree, two buttons saying chilled and frozen would also work for me.
I've used a number of microwaves with these modes which asked for a weight. Those were pretty untrustworthy on their results, because moisture content and starting temp can vary greatly.
I stumbled upon them, but I strongly think the mid-2000's era GE Profile are probably some of the best appliances ever made. They were at least the best dishwasher, oven, and microwave I've ever used.
We need to make small claims court far more accessible. But outside of the GDPR, there's also just weirdness in terms of what is covered where. I can appreciate that having laws at the county level, the municipal level can be onerous to comply with, so you want things at the national level -- if not international.
But as soon as you do that, some asshat works to reduce regulation because "regulation bad" without any qualifiers. And then as you say, lack of enforcement, is that alternative to this.
Give them their laws, make them feel as if things have been done, but then don't enforce. You're in the same boat, but people "feel" better.
This is a bit of a tangent, but where I live you have to cook a hamburger to safe temperatures. It is illegal to do otherwise, unless it is freshly ground in house, and we have actual, real inspectors that will ensure safe handling practices.
(This isn't me railing about eating raw meat, I eat my steak med-rare. But that's a steak, if you're going to cook a hamburger that way, you need to wash the outside, grind it up, and cook+eat it within hours. Many restaurants are buying mass produced burger paddies and not even cooking them, which is pure insane.)
Yet when I was in California, it's OK to just present a charred outside, a raw inside, along with loads of parasites. The restaurant is covered if they put up a sign saying something about 'raw meat can make you sick' or whatever.
So every restaurant puts up the sign, then just doesn't care about cooking it to safe temps. Yee-haw, FREEDOM!
Point is, people themselves, everywhere ... whether it's a small business or just their customers, don't even know, understand, or really care.
And this is the true problem. People can't even understand the risks of raw meat, something I was taught in public school when, oh I don't know, freakin' 10 years old!
While it doesn't seem that difficult to people on this forum likely, it surely is for the average person. Clearly.
Is the fantasy that some entrepreneurial savior will come along and voluntarily forgo all the massive spying profits in order to cater to the minute proportion of consumers perceptive enough to realize they're getting molested on the daily?
How about smartphones, for example? "Vote with your wallet," says the smirking corporatocrat, "and just buy a mobile operating system that respects your personal privacy." Alright professor, looks like my choices are iOS or Android, so I'm kind of hosed either way? Unless I want to return to a 2004 feature set, or perhaps a GNU/Linux paperweight with a 20-minute battery life that can't use banking apps or place phone calls?
I exaggerate (but in my opinion only slightly), and sincere apologies for tone--but it's quite frustrating to be met again and again with such a smug dismissal of what to many of us feels like an inescapable horror. This depraved race to the bottom, with every MBA-steered ship vying to see who can violate us the hardest, seems to be standard practice these days, and "purchase different products" puts the onus on consumers to fix what isn't their fault in a way that leaves an awful taste in my mouth.
I wanted to buy an etablet but Remarkable has a subscription, so I bought a smaller brand, it's worse, but they got my money.
You want a phone that respects your privacy? There isn't a business model that supports that, so don't support it. Yes you can't have your banking app, but that's the deal, you just dont like it. If no one bought it, there would be a market for alternatives.
Nothing will change these companies apart from market forces.
You tell me that nothing will change the companies apart from market forces, but in response to another commenter you said it well yourself: "this kind of behavior should be illegal." If we had consumer protection laws, and those laws had teeth, maybe a company would have to consider the possible risk to future profits of engaging in the next abusive, ethically bankrupt scheme. It wouldn't be possible to be, as former FTC chair and antitrust warrior Lina Khan put it, "too big to care."
I'm not so naive as to imagine that more economic guardrails are a panacea for consumer suffering, but to me it seems that the globalized economy and its Western democratic hegemons have spent much of the post-WWII era on a deregulatory death march, and we can see with our own eyes how well it's going.
My most recent example: I wanted to calibrate my display using a "calibrite display pro hl" and suddenly got prompted with a software update. After updating, an account is suddenly required. This device is way past its return date. I cannot return it. I'm now stuck with a device that cannot be used with their software without creating an account.
Another example: Philips Hue devices were changed to require an account.
These days I focus on getting commercial variants of devices, since they usually don't have cloud or smart crap in them. For example, there's commercial variants of many TVs. They don't have smart crap in them and are designed for 24/7 usage.
The foot in the door was theft prevention. Crime rates in the targeted regions of those devices was the original motivation and the enabler. From Chesterton's Fence principle, that has to be solved before the zero consumer ownership problem can be solved.
If I have a thing, that thing should obey me. Be it a crowbar, a PC, a smart lamp or whatever. It's a value in and of itself that I can trust in my things. What about criminals? Sure, it is convenient a car can spy on a criminal and tell the police where they are, but we shouldn't allow that. Just like it would be convenient to force priests and lawyers to tell there secrets, but we as a society decided that there is greater value in confidentiality.
I mean especially for a society like the US which is traditionally individualistic and distrustful towards government etc., it should be a matter of principle that "my stuff" doesn't spy on my and serves me and no one else.
Give it 5 years. The xiaomi or LG above the bed is likely already watching and listening. Interesting how the taboo shifted from "no camera in the apartment" to "no camera in a bathroom". In many short term rentals you have outright always connected IP camera installed inside apartment because of "break ins", "squatters", etc. The owners don't see a problem, don't accept complains.
Those IR sensors are basically cameras; they are wired up for power, they trigger with your image.
So don’t act all surprised when they are hacked and subverted to the visible spectrum and recording capabilities.
So it matters not whether it's one pixel or 50 megapixels doing the work there, what matters is that everyone who attends a baseball game or eats at a restaurant is accustomed to a conscious machine that can "see" their buttcheeks well enough to know exactly when to activate the flusher without any pesky hu-man touching it.
And that there is electrical power and, probably, networking available in the restrooms so that the conscious machines can stay alive and discuss buttcheek sightings with one another and their mothership.
Yeah, everybody here agrees. The main problem is to get this implemented and this will not happen by just venting here. So I'm still waiting for someone with good ideas.
The fact nearly zero legislation has been introduced to punish companies for violating the protection of our data with the bazillions of data leaks is telling of which master they serve.
Most companies care more about it being a rental device than a spying device
Every TV, phone, camera, tablet, fridge, ... is becoming a spying device like in the worst scifi dystopias. And as soon as the company stops supporting them they become trash to pollute the planet so they can sell you the next one.
Regulations should have come a decade a go. We own nothing, we have no privacy, we are sold products 24/7. I will vote for a goverment that protects me of this total corporate surveillance. It is their duty towards citizens to do so.
And it will happen, like feudalism died this techno-feudalism will die too.