Comment by varispeed
6 years ago
I think this business model where someone buying purchasing a physical product must register their data with manufacturer or 3rd party service and be constantly online should be made illegal. There is no business need for this apart from spying on people and gathering data to improve manipulation of messages to trick people into buying more into the manufacturer ecosystem. We need to stop this.
I don't think we should ban the whole class of online connected products. Just insist they publish a public API under terms that allow competitors to implement it and configure it on the device. Then anybody can create an alternative ecosystem for the device.
What could you do with a Google Home or Amazon Echo without connectivity? The physical product is premised on being able to search the web and stream music.
It should have self-hosted voice recognition software and be able plug to your own music collection on your NAS. If you wanted features like weather forecast, then these should be opt in and only send anonymous data related to weather forecast request. It should be illegal to use even those anonymised requests to do commercial research without paying the customer.
Your comment echoes one aspect of the article discussed here recently (authored by Jaron Lanier and Glen Weyl), arguing that "AI is an Ideology, Not a Technology": people should be compensated for generating data used to train models.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24753664
So you think if someone is selling a physical product and they require registration that it's reasonable to force them to stop requiring it with the threat of physical violence from the government?
I just don't see how that is justified. The seller isn't defrauding anyone and isn't using violence themselves. It's so much more easy and ethical to just not buy the product. All you can do is take personal responsibility. Calling for violent coercion like you've done is wrong.
Why would they require registration? They should have customer data on the invoice. There is no need for anything else.
I agree. That's why when Facebook bought Oculus back in 2014 I decided to buy the open platform HMD instead, the Vive. It was obvious even then what Facebook would do. What they always do. And the way to get around it is to not use Facebook products or services.