Sonos Makes It Clear : You No Longer Own The Things You Buy - VICE
▻https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/3a8dpn/sonos-makes-it-clear-you-no-longer-own-the-things-you-buy
$300 smart hubs that are suddenly bricked when the manufacturer is sold. Video game consoles that mysteriously lose features after you bring them home. Books or films you purchase that you suddenly and inexplicably lose the ability to access. Printers that don’t print without an ink subscription.
In the modern internet era, it’s increasingly clear that consumers no longer actually own the things we buy. Instead, we’re shelling out big bucks for products that can easily lose features or worse—stop working entirely on the whim of a corporation.
The latest example comes courtesy of Sonos, which this week informed customers in an email that it would no longer be supporting certain speaker systems. In the email, the company says that certain “legacy” systems will stop receiving security and software updates starting in May.
“Legacy products were introduced between 2005 and 2011 and, given the age of the technology, do not have enough memory or processing power to sustain future innovation,” the company’s email claims. Users that have shelled out hundreds or thousands of dollars for smart speakers that still work didn’t take the news particularly well.
Nathan Proctor, the head of USPIRG’s Right to Repair Campaign, told Motherboard that Sonos’ decision to leave consumers between a rock and a hard place is emblematic of a tech industry in which sustainability, security, and consumer rights are often distant afterthoughts.
“This is an epidemic problem,” Proctor said, noting that having millions of unsupported and unpatched devices connected to the internet poses significant security risks for an internet of things sector already widely criticized for being a privacy and security dumpster fire.
Proctor said forced obsolescence also not only incentives the public to discard perfectly good hardware, products now effectively have expiration dates that consumers aren’t being clearly informed of at the time of purchase.
#Obsolescence_programmée #Internet_des_objets #Cybersécurité