This was the article's highlight for me. As a senior programmer I found myself saying "no" to more and more tech nowadays -- smart speakers are and will always be not welcome in my house, I carefully study mobile app permissions and deny everything but the absolutely necessary minimum (on my mother's phone as well), I am unplugging microphones and webcams when not using them, I refuse to buy washing machines and any kind of kitchen tech with touch screens (they are awfully non-durable, big surprise right?) and prefer tech with real, physical buttons.
I am never gonna give WiFi access to my TV. I am even considering making my home WiFi network hidden (not advertised). If you manually specify SSID and password you will connect alright but you can never see the SSID. I feel this might be a necessary default before too long. We'll see.
I did give WiFi access to my printer because accessing it through the router's USB port turned into a nightmare of problems and inconsistency. I disallowed it to make outgoing connections (through the router) anywhere but in the local network however -- I don't want it going to the internet.
Point is, new tech is marketed as "progress" for mercantile reasons by the big corps and me and many others aren't just taking their word for it when they say it's for the best of all of us.
My rather depressing observation has been that historically, ever since the 90s, technology and especially computers / phones aren't used to improve people's lives; they only complicate them and increase people's time, energy and money expenses. To actually improve your life with tech you have to go a lot of extra miles.
The marketed "progress" technologies don't deserve the benefit of the doubt lately. It's all but a historical fact that most "progress" is mostly "guys, here's a new market we just invented, please buy because we want the money".