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Sonos: users must accept new privacy policy or devices may “cease to function”

zdnet.com

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Re: Sonos: users must accept new privacy policy or devices may “cease to function”

#131

Post by Silhouette »

justincormack wrote: post #93
Silhouette wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm starting to think that any sort of B2C legal agreements, but particularly standard form contracts and similar documents like terms of service, EULAs and privacy policies, should be explicitly banned from including terms that essentially say the deal can be revised unilaterally and the customer is responsible for keeping an eye out for this. It's simply not a reasonable or practical arrangement for any normal pers…

I don't think they are valid in most jurisdictions, explicit consent is required.

I suspect a lawyer might say you're right, though since most people aren't lawyers, the damage may be significant even from letting them include the terms in the first place.

More importantly, I don't think consent is sufficient in this sort of situation. It has to be a real choice, so even if you choose not to consent to the change, you're not then losing out on something you already paid for or otherwise giving up your normal legal consumer rights as a consequence.

In a situation where the continued effective functioning of a purchased item is dependent on some other facility, and that facility and the related functionality can be turned off if you don't accept the manufacturer/vendor moving the goalposts retrospectively, I don't see much ethical or practical difference between using this dependency as a lever to force a customer to accept revisions in some other aspect of the deal and just doing the other thing without their consent anyway.

Re: Sonos: users must accept new privacy policy or devices may “cease to function”

#132

Post by pale-hands »

justin66 wrote: post #58
thecopy wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you recommend some alternatives?

Run Squeezelite on multiple Raspberry Pis paired with decent USB audio adapters (Berhinger UCA222 - decent analog and also optical out). Music served from a PC using the standard Logitech Media Server software, playback controlled with either the standard web interface or the Squeezer android app. Plug the RPis into decent stereos (not a powered speaker unless you are some kind of rabid animal) and you've got a good…

Great advice. I've had squeezeboxes since the SB1 in 2003, and recently got a Hifiberry amp running Squeezelite. It's as minimal as it gets -- power brick, RPi + amp in a custom case, and speakers. The class D amp is surprisingly pleasant.

Re: Sonos: users must accept new privacy policy or devices may “cease to function”

#133

Post by pedrocr »

Anyone have another suggestion for a pair of wifi speakers that can be assigned to Left/Right to get stereo and can be network streamed to and have another device on the network with a line-in?

I was about to buy 2 Play1's and a Connect to do a stereo install in a room where I don't want to run speaker cable. I had researched wackier home-built solutions and was going to give up and go for the Sonos. Now I'm once again considering wackier home-built stuff like 3 raspberry pi's attached to line-in and two dumb powered speakers.

Re: Sonos: users must accept new privacy policy or devices may “cease to function”

#134

Post by CaptSpify »

lj3 wrote: post #51
swiley wrote: post #34

If you can't read the source and build the firmware yourself you don't own the device. It's that simple. Stop putting up with closed non trivial firmware and these sorts of problems go away.

Which makes your options 'roll it yourself' or 'do without'. Just because somebody chose door #3 doesn't mean they should be expected to get shafted at every opportunity.

I agree that they shouldn't expect to, but they shouldn't be surprised either.

Re: Sonos: users must accept new privacy policy or devices may “cease to function”

#135

Post by CaptSpify »

ViViDboarder wrote: post #73
pm24601 wrote: post #62

And reason #458 why I am skipping the whole "IoT revolution" in my home. I consider this motivation for DIY.

There are a good amount of IoT devices that work offline and don't use public internet at all. I specifically buy devices that aren't bound to the Internet and I've found a good amount.

Where do you typically find them? I've had very little luck with that

Re: Sonos: users must accept new privacy policy or devices may “cease to function”

#136

Post by CaptSpify »

I looked at these speakers a few months ago. They look really cool. As soon as I saw that they require phoning home, I said "lolno" and built my own speaker system with RPIs.

I love the idea of smart devices, but only as long as the software is Free and Open. I really don't understand people who think situations like this are acceptable.

Re: Sonos: users must accept new privacy policy or devices may “cease to function”

#137

Post by alphaalpha101 »

ViViDboarder wrote: post #73
pm24601 wrote: post #62

And reason #458 why I am skipping the whole "IoT revolution" in my home. I consider this motivation for DIY.

There are a good amount of IoT devices that work offline and don't use public internet at all. I specifically buy devices that aren't bound to the Internet and I've found a good amount.

I'm pretty sure by definition IoT devices use the internet..

Re: Sonos: users must accept new privacy policy or devices may “cease to function”

#138

Post by alphaalpha101 »

throwaway2016a wrote: post #78
pavel_lishin wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So worst case is they turn into regular speakers. If I wanted regular speakers, I would have bought regular speakers.

My point being the speakers are the only part of it that are a product. Everything else is clearly a service. The part of the speaker that is actually a product is unlikely to stop working.

Everything else is 'clearly' a service? On what basis? You buy a product, it has these features, you can do these things, that's the product.

Being able to play music on a 'smart speaker' from my phone isn't a service, it's just a feature of the product. If you sell a product with features that require you to host some servers somewhere publicly accessible on the internet, that doesn't make that product feature a service.

Don't like that? Don't include those features in your product. Design them better so you don't have to forever maintain these servers.

Re: Sonos: users must accept new privacy policy or devices may “cease to function”

#139

Post by alphaalpha101 »

throwaway2016a wrote: post #77
pm24601 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I find it hard to believe .... until it does happen as they promised ... > sound systems that may eventually "cease to function". Not just some part of it but all of it.

I find it hard to believe for technical reasons. From what I can tell in the Network traffic the speaker actually talks directly to Spotify for instance. They would need to have a remote kill switch and use it. Secondly, they have done this before (forced agreeing to the terms to do a software update) and every time they have warned "some functionality might cease to work" and every time I kept using it past the cuto…

So they've already released 'updates' that break the device and reduces its feature set, and you're okay with this?

Re: Sonos: users must accept new privacy policy or devices may “cease to function”

#140

Post by Naga »

dvdhnt wrote: post #129
ethnic_throw wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Taxes ≠ rents.

Generally, I would agree, and in the broadest sense of the terms, they are not equal. You can call anything whatever you want; you can put lipstick on a pig but it's still a pig. England used taxation as a way to maintain control over its colonies regardless of how it turned out. Eventually, and most famously, the U.S. realized the taxation was a form of oppression and not for the common good. People who didn't pay t…

The American Revolution isn't nearly as clear cut as that. It wasn't anti-taxation, it was anti-taxation without representation. The colonists were objecting to being taxed without having a say in the levying of the taxes. There were many colonial Americans who would have been happy returning Members to Parliament without independence.

The core of the issue really was that Britain defended the American colonies from French invasion during the Seven Year's War and the British taxpayer bore the brunt of the taxation (I can't remember exact figures, but Britons were taxed much, much heavier than Americans, even after the stamp duties and tea taxes). After the war, Parliament came looking for payback, understandably. So Britain wasn't using taxation to control the colonies, it was looking to recoup the costs of defending them.

On a sidenote, this is actually quite interesting in today's context over NATO military spending, where now it is Britain freeloading on American military spending.

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