Hardly Ideal wrote:Not sure if this is the right thread, but that's one of the things that's really making me nervous about this whole "internet of things" business: will companies be able to fuck with how I use my products?
Yes.
We've already had Keurig
block third-party coffee pods (it backed off after major customer backlash), the makers of an IoT garage door opener
disable a user's account over some nasty reviews and complaints, and that doesn't even get into stuff like the total lack of security, TVs spying on their users either by
manufacturer's design or
CIA malware, or the possibility that you'll buy a device and then it'll get bought up by a company that
shuts down the servers it needs to run and it won't work anymore.
In summary: do not buy IoT devices.
Ideally, don't buy smart TVs, either, but it's getting increasingly hard to find TVs that don't have some kind of connectivity. (A PC monitor might be a good alternative, but they don't generally make those bigger than 32".) If you do get a smart TV, don't connect it to your wifi. I'm not aware of any TVs designed to search for open wifi networks, but I sure as hell wouldn't put it past the manufacturers.
Broader view: well, there are states pushing right-to-repair laws (largely as a result of the John Deere story Buge referred to), and gray hat hackers designing botnets to disable insecure devices before they're compromised by
other botnets. But we've also got Hollywood, Google, Microsoft, Apple, et al pushing to approve W3C-standard DRM, and Congress just pulled a fast one and voted to make the head of the Copyright Office a presidential appointee instead of an employee of the Library of Congress.
The next few years are going to be interesting.