An engineer got curious about how his iLife A11 smart vacuum worked and monitored the network traffic coming from the device. That’s when he noticed it was constantly sending logs and telemetry data to the manufacturer — something he hadn’t consented to. The user, Harishankar, decided to block the telemetry servers’ IP addresses on his network, while keeping the firmware and OTA servers open. While his smart gadget worked for a while, it just refused to turn on soon after. After a lengthy investigation, he discovered that a remote kill command had been issued to his device.
I’d be in favour of a law that prohibits illegal items in terms of service with some massive punishments associated to them. Something like 0.01% of total annual revenue per line item that is illegal per affected customer. You put a law like that into place and you’d find that terms of service would tighten up and become much more reasonable VERY quickly. The revenue gathered from such fines could fund an enforcement agency that receives complaints/reports to investigate and then starts proactively searching through existing terms of service for products. Pay bonuses to employees for each breach found to incentivise the proactive work that funds the agency. Long term it would be zero cost to the taxpayer and would enforce end users’ rights at the same time.