Privacy

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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

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The Philips Hue ecosystem is collapsing into stupidity (rachelbythebay.com)

submitted 1 year ago by narwhal@lemmy.ml to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

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Their latest round of stupidity pops up a new EULA and forces you to take it or, again, you can't access your stuff. But that's just more unenforceable garbage, so who cares, right? Well, it's getting worse.

It seems they are planning on dropping an update which will force you to log in. Yep, no longer will your stuff Just Work across the local network. Now it will have yet another garbage "cloud" "integration" involved, and they certainly will find a way to make things suck even worse for you.

If you ever saw the South Park episode where they try to get the cable company to do something on their behalf and the cable company people just touch themselves inappropriately upon hearing the lamentations of their customers, well, I suspect that's what's going on here. The management of these places are fundamentally sadists, and they are going to auger all of these things into the ground to make their short-term money before flying the coop for the next big thing they can destroy.

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[–] WetBeardHairs@lemmy.ml 9 points 1 year ago (2 children)

There is a bog standard line in nearly every ToS "We have the right to modify this terms of service without notification to the user" blah blah blah. It probably even holds up in court.

[–] Umbrias@beehaw.org 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

They do not.

The format where they do is when it is a service provider and they simply stop service of the contract. I.e. if you don't accept the terms and services for say, using reddit, they can just choose to not continue providing you access to those servers.

But it didn't hold up on contracts involving already rendered services or anything really other then the outcome of declining being 'everyone exiting the contract' or simply moving back to the previous contract.

Courts in the us have pretty much universally upheld that contracts cannot be changed without all parties agreeing.

[–] WetBeardHairs@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago

Yeah but the whole tech industry operates as Whatever-as-a-Service now, which means those ToS changes are able to be applied whenever they like. You either continue using the service or you don't. This apparently applies to lightbulbs now. Lightbulbs as a Service. Sigh.

[–] osmoen@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Does it matter that these ToS aren't available until after you buy the product? I mean, these agreements are rarely posted right next to the product in-store or online. Right?

[–] WetBeardHairs@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago

You can own a doodad but it's a static, useless doodad until you agree to the ToS which allows you to use it.