The real problem with @Blaster_M@lemmy.world’s comment was to blame the victim. It may be sensible to blame the victim, but let’s not lose focus on the perp.
The real problem with @Blaster_M@lemmy.world’s comment was to blame the victim. It may be sensible to blame the victim, but let’s not lose focus on the perp.
Don’t try to strawman this. Human rights are violated when someone is deprived of their property (their data in the case at hand). If food is withheld from starving people in Gaza, your argument is like saying:
“Claims human rights are being violated because someone failed to drive a truck”
beehaw.org defederated from lemmy.ml. And I don’t blame them. I actually try not to post to lemmy.ml or any of the Cloudflare-centralized nodes (lemmy.world, sh.itjust.works, lemm.ee, etc) but it slipped my mind when I posted here.
(edit) sorry, i’m confused. I thought beehaw.org defederated from lemmy.ml, but both the post herein and the original are on lemmy.ml yet you can reach this one. So I’m missing something. I wonder if you are able to see infosec.pub-mirrored content and maybe the original community has no infosec subscribers? hard to say.
You’re very trusting of your corporate overlords. I’m sure they are grateful for your steadfast loyalty and trust.
No amount of money you pay for your phone up-front will make that malicious code magically go away. You can pay cash, and you can even tip the seller. The code that reduces your control remains in that device. If you don’t control it, you don’t own it.
If you fail to use rights granted to you by free software licenses, you can blame yourself.
You’re not getting it. Again:
If you don’t control it, you don’t own it.
Buying something does not mean you control it. You might have bought an Amazon Ring doorbell but if Amazon does not like your behavior they can (and will) render it dysfunctional.
If you don’t control it, you don’t own it.
I guess a closer analogy would be rental storage. If you don’t pay your mini storage bill, in some regions the landlord will confiscate your property, holding it hostage until you pay. And if that fails, they’ll even auction off your contents.
So in the case at hand the creditor is holding the debtor’s data hostage. One difference is that the data has no value to the creditor and is not in the creditor’s possession. It would be interesting to know if the contracts in place legally designate the data as the creditor’s property. If not, the data remains the property of the consumer.
This is covered by human rights law. Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 17 ¶2:
“No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his property.”
If the phone user did not sign off on repossession of their data, and thus the data remains their property, then the above-quoted human right is violated in the OP’s scenario.
If the creditor wants to collect on a debt, there is a court process for that. I’ve used it. It works.
Locking the phone is not repossession. It does nothing other than sabotage the device the consumer may need to actually make the payment. The phone remains in the buyer’s possession and useless to the seller.
Power is also misplaced. What happens when the creditor decides to (illegally) refuse cash payments on the debt? Defaulting is not necessarily the debtor’s fault. This in fact happened to me: Creditor refused my cash payment and dragged me into court for delinquency. Judge ruled in my favor because cash acceptance is an obligation. But this law is being disregarded by creditors all over. If the creditor had the option to sabotage my lifestyle by blocking communication and computing access, it would have been a greater injustice.
#WarOnCash
You’re still not grasping how free software works. Users have a right to see the code and the right to change it. They also have the right to redistribute the code. Your complaint is unfounded because not a single user of a fully free platform is forced to have remote management code installed.
It should be regulated against by governments. The EU is slowly heading in the right direction. We’re letting these tech companies do whatever the fuck they want to.
I wonder if it already is illegal. Have you looked into that? Did they disclose this “feature” in any of the agreements or literature that came with the device so that you could return it for a refund? Maybe you have a good legal case here.
You don’t own the phone. That’s how
creditnonfree software works.
↑ corrected that for you.
The code is inherently in the firmware (edit: kernel) no matter how you acquire the phone.
If you don’t control it, you don’t own it.
Most of my shopping is done at street markets. When a big parking is filled with vans and portable tables on a weekly basis, there is no surveillance. But if I need something very particular then the cash option gets threatened. E.g. I would like to have a Flipper Zero but these are never at street markets and not even on any shelves anywhere.
I wouldn’t choose a custom rom on the sole basis of anti-theft. My ½-baked suggestion was simply disable the playstore framework (so it’s present but just dead code) and installing an app on the side.
Anyway, I have no interest in anti-theft bricking myself. I don’t envision ever having a phone where i would care about the hardware and would not likely spend more than $50 on a phone. Exceptionally I could one day get a Fairphone. But remote bricking does not tempt me. Making the phone a brick more quickly gets the phone into a landfill as it becomes useless for everyone.
It’s worth noting why phones get stolen. Even cheap phones are getting stolen. It’s not for the hardware. It’s because SIM registration makes it hard for criminals to get anonymous burner chips. So they steal phones just for GSM chips that are registered to someone else.
I think Fairphone did not exist when I last bought a phone. But you make a good point; I overlooked that. It will probably be my next phone whenever I reach a point where open street maps no longer updates on my phone.
I think I read somewhere it’s normally 13, and that’s what worked for me. Thanks for the ‘list users’ command… that confirmed it on my phone.
This has nothing to do with Google.
Google welded anti-consumer logic into the kernel. Of course that’s on Google. Just like Intel started making CPUs with a management engine that can only work against non-corporate consumers, basically saying fuck the individuals’ needs… putting individuals at unconscionable risk without their knowledge or consent.
Consumers have decisions to make. Is a consumer happy to feed a supplier who sells them something that works against them? Some are. I’m not. Going forward they fail to earn my business because they have too many masters.
You going to ditch Linux because they support remote management too?
Linux is not locked down. Users can remove anything they want from it.
They’re not at odds. We don’t have to choose between protecting UDHR Art.3 and Art.17. It’s foolish to disregard some portion of the UDHR needlessly and arbitrarily.