• 2 Posts
  • 36 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: October 16th, 2023

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  • 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








  • 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.




  • 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.