IoT garage door opener maker disables customer’s service after bad review
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
I get the feeling a lawyer told him to explicitly state it wasn't about the review because there is a new federal law that protects reviewers. That statement doesn't jive with his previous posts.
- Musk had not already sold the individual a car.
- Musk was (possibly) responding not to the critical blog post, but to the content of the phone conversation.
- It has not been decided yet, but I doubt Garadget will ultimately have the popularity and cachet of Tesla's cars. This, for better or worse, does have an impact on what you can get away with.
- All of the above notwithstanding, maybe this was not Elon Musk's finest moment. Not ever word out of his mouth is useful for all purposes. Citing the fact he said something, even if he was in a situation that is perfectly analogous to one's own, does not justify one's comparable action.
That being said, I do agree with all your points. I tend to think no garage door company is going to have the cachet of any Elon Musk company. Frankly, only Elon Musk could send out that tweet and not get hammered.
And do it with less snark. Just state it seems clear you won't ever see eye to eye, and give the money back.
It would have achieved the exact same result, and I am sure the backlash wouldn't be 10% as severe.
In this case, I would have tried to help online (in the forum) at least once, despite the rude forum post. If it kept up, I'd have emailed the "we need to part ways, here's a refund" note.
Legally, the remedy for breach of contract is to make the injured party whole, and that includes consequential damages. The customer may suffer consequential damages in excess of the price paid for the product (eg. "After buying your product I bought a new garage door to suit your product and now I have to get a different one to use with your competitor's product since the next best thing requires a different specification").
Offering a full refund is still entirely appropriate of course; I'm just pointing out that the customer doesn't have to accept that as a final settlement.
I don't see a customer getting a free garage door out of it. Using the refund to buy a competitive product would arguably make them whole. Minus perhaps wasted time. Assuming you parted ways because of their behavior (not a review), they arguably wasted their own time.
Nor do I. That would imply that the customer had some extra asset at the end. That is beyond making the customer whole, because such a thing presumably has a market value and can be sold, even if just for scrap.
> Using the refund to buy a competitive product would arguably make them whole.
Not necessarily. If the customer has additional costs that have not been reimbursed, and these costs were incurred as a consequence of the seller's breach of contract despite the customer's reasonable efforts to minimize them, then by definition the customer hasn't been made whole. Search for the meaning of "consequential damages".
It's up to the court to decide how to address the balance. It may decide that it isn't reasonable to reimburse some extra costs anyway. And in the US, legal fees won't be reimbursed so the customer may decide to settle for less. But if it does go to court, then in the case that the seller has "fired" the customer unreasonably the court may look upon the customer's claims for consequential damages more favorably.
I can't get a new car if I buy an alternator and it's faulty. Maybe if it damaged the car, but there's no corollary here.
Edit: This happens all the time. Amazon "fires" sellers. Hosting companies "fire" people that suffered a DDOS, or similar cases to this one...customers that are snarky with tech support. Paypal "fires" customers at will, often with no details as to why. I've read many of these stories and never heard of a case where someone got something more than actual, direct losses back (like existing account balance).
Some sellers may attempt to adjust the contracts to make this true. Depending on your jurisdiction and the nature of the sale, this may or may not actually change the contract. AFAIK, we have yet to see a clause of "I'll sell you this IoT device for a one-off payment of $X and I can arbitrarily decide to stop it working as long as I pay you $X and nothing more" succeed in court.
Not court cases, but IoT customers do get abandoned.
Google's Nest bought Revolv and shut it down. As far as I know, they offered nothing at all as compensation. These were $300 devices. No related successful court cases from end users, as far as I know...and that's worse than what I suggested...no refund.
Fair enough?
This "firing customers" terminology shows how deep in the Late Capitalism nightmare we really are.
The pizza place offered them free coupons to try to fix the situation! haha
That said, there seems to be this attitude among some tech companies that they can do whatever they want, and treat customers/users like crap, regardless of regulations, or just what is usual and customary. I think it's a side-effect of people who have no prior business background getting a ton of investor money (i.e. not earning it from business with customers).
But in this case we are talking about bricking hardware remotely in retribution for a negative review. And we have people using the "Firing customers" rhetoric to insinuate that the needs of the corporation are more important than the needs of the human.
[I think we're basically in agreement, just expanding on my point]
Euh that's exactly what's happening here. If the company bricks the product you bought it's a net loss. So you're definitely not getting what you paid for. The analogy would work only if you decided to do before anything was bought (impossible of course) or refund them 100%.
Is that really desirable, once you think about it that way?
And do you really think this is some sort of "Late Capitalism nightmare"? You really think nobody had ever decided not to do business with a specific customer before?
This isn't a "late capitalism" issue; this is a "social media greatly amplifies previously quiet signals, and does so with a certain amount of randomness". But the reality probably hasn't changed... just your ability to detect it.
Are you actually defending the practice of a company damaging or destroying private property, remotely, in retribution for a bad review?
Try re-reading in that context and thinking about it again.
If you seriously put your pride on a pedestal next to all of that, you just shouldn't be dealing with B2C in the first place; you will be a menace to your organization.
However, to me, there is a line. "The customer is always right" can't be literal.
I have no issue parting ways, with a full refund, for toxic customers that repeatedly use abusive language with my employees. Especially when it's not relative to the situation. These kind of customers do exist. It's not common, but do e-commerce long enough and you'll run into one.
There are also (not often) customers that engage in return fraud or other activity that is just obvious cause to avoid them in the future.
That appears to be before any contact with anyone at all.
That, alone, doesn't cross a line. But it is a clue that the interaction might quickly lead down a path where you choose to part ways.
I'd have been initially polite, helpful, try to fix the issue, etc. But there would be some line where I'd stop.
people put the slightest emotions they get on a pedestal as a valid reason to do and justify anything.
If you approach everyone who so much as barks like they're a mad dog, you'll end up meeting a shocking number "mad dogs".
You're likely to get better service from me if you're polite. I don't feel badly about that.
I respect your position, I do, and I wish it were the standard, but realistically it puts you at a potential disadvantage.
"Fuck this product."
There's very little a customer can do to meaningfully impact either of them. Hell, the companies can be (and regularly are) shitty to someone personally, and they still will use their services.
EDIT: more counterexamples - Comodo. Lenovo. Uber. AirBnB. They were all involved in huge Internet shitstorms about anti-customer behaviours, and they don't look like they've lost anything through it. I've seen enough shitstorms - small and big, local and global - to learn that they generally don't mean a thing, and most people forget about them in a week.
Grocery Stores? I don't see how that applies... they tend to be highly customer-focused, and they certainly don't do the equivalent of bricking a product after selling it to you because they didn't like your tone.
Still I take your point... if you're a Unicorn then you play by different rules, until/unless it all catches up with you (as it is with Uber). If however, you're not a telecom monopoly, a giant bank, or just crazy like Uber (if for example you're trying to sell IoT fricking door openers) then you are in a very very different position don't you think?!
- bribe the customers leaving negative reviews into cancelling them, by offering e.g. free products
- use multiple accounts on the marketplace services, kill off an account after it got too many negative reviews and create a new one to continue
The point being, "customer is always right" is not something that works for all B2C; depending on your market type, there may be strategies that let you be pretty much immune from the effects of a wronged customer seeking revenge. For instance, commodity items are bought by people who are mostly price-sensitive; as long as you keep a lower price, even angry reviews won't mean much. This works well for brick-and-mortar grocery stores (and other inherently local stores) and for business that sell through on-line marketplaces like eBay. It's sometimes even beneficial to not have a strong social media presence - Facebook pages and Twitter accounts are a good place for angry customers to vent off and spread the bad word about you.
Basically, this is a business in which you need to desperately convince the customer to want an ongoing relationship with you, for a service they could get with a $5 remote, 9volt included.
The company here behaved wrong and they deserve whatever loss of business comes out of this mess, regardless of how rude the customer was. They handled it badly. That said, I have no particular love for IoT companies - I find the idea of those cloud-connected devices to be dumb from both user and engineering point of view. To be clear - I'm not opposed to smart devices per se - just those which require vendor's cloud, which makes them basically hardware-as-a-service, and which works against privacy and interoperability.
I strongly disagree with the assertion all customers can be dealt with "civilly" while still remaining sane. Customer irrationality is widely varied, and sometimes you just need to take matters into Fate's hands to get back to rationality. OTOH, it's not something you want to do regularly, with the customers that is.
What you see as "customer irrationality" is, in 99.9% of cases, actually a user experience problem that could have been addressed with better design and better testing before the customer ever bought the product.
For that remaining 0.1%, the appropriate course of action is not to deal with people poorly and treat your customers badly, but to offload your customer services to someone else who is more patient and more capable.
Some customers are really problem people, and a private company is not a charity in business of teaching people how to live in a civilized society. So it's a reasonable business decision to try and get rid of some of the customers (or risk your support people burning out); the issue is not whether to do it, but how to do it without risking additional damage to your business.
It is simply impossible to know what me, or the fictitious irrational customer, is thinking, regardless of made up statistics that are meaningless to anything when it (the irrational event) actually happens. Thinking that it can be "solved in the future" by moving some things around in this reality is irrational as well, especially given you assume that process may be improved to the point it doesn't happen "much" or there are people with infinitely more patience than the previous person to deal with it, or that people won't become more irrational when you force them into rational action. All irrational, which is simply meant to say, it will require more work to determine.
That I'm being downvoted is one piece of evidence there are people who don't like what I'm saying because they think it also can be "solved". Also irrational. So, I state it again now for good measure:
"One may not remain rational while being forced to deal with a given amount of irrationality."
Most importantly, it's not something you deal with publicly.
This is bullshit.
Part of what makes humans work is the fact we often won't take abuse even though it might make financial sense to let's our selves be abused.
You have every right to deal with it civilly, but the few business owers who don't deal with a$$holes are making your life better.
No comment on this particular case.
Nope, it does.
His original post (not posts) pointed at foul language first and foremost, which was then compounded by posting an equally charming Amazon review without making any attempt to wait for a reply. So his follow-up matches the post that led to this whole brouhaha.
But let's not allow this ruin all the fun of the vigilante justice and trying to beat the living daylights out this guy.
The expectation is that a company is much more aware of the risk tied to a contract it enters (f.e. by having it examined by a legal department, requiring the supplier it wants to buy services or goods from to first sign their own contract that lays out some ground rules etc), and is generally much more professional in handling such situations.
You would wish that normal consumers also read their contracts carefully and understand them, but in reality they do not. So there is a long list of laws in place to protect them and "level the playing field" between unsuspecting consumers and corporations.
That relationship is severely imbalanced in B2C transactions, and abusing that it is why consumer protection laws exist. Given the widespread acknowledgment of the abusable nature of that relationship, the only reasonable expectation to abusing it that doesn't rise to the level of crime or tort is still loud public disapproval.
I personally think they were both completely in the wrong, but I get where he's coming from. Heck, the guy probably hangs out here and felt like he was in the right given the reaction to Musk's childish stunt.
Why not?
> to speak of firing customers is an abusive cognitive power play.
The guy responsible for the term "fired" was well known for abusive power plays - http://meta.ath0.com/2015/03/17/etymology-of-youre-fired/
> Patterson had a way to deal with executives who particularly displeased him. in a previous case, he had the businessman’s desk and chair dragged out onto the lawn, where they were set on fire. Apparently Watson’s desk was similarly dragged out and burned, and the man himself was dismissed. When other employees asked where Watson was, Patterson simply said “Fired.”
When an IoT maker adds 'cloud' to their product and makes it inextricably tied to the product's functionality, you have to be able to rely on their ability and willingness to maintain the cloud services for as long as you use the product.
This is an utterly stupid comparison. Razorblades cost less than 10 cents and are disposable by design. You don't spend $100 on a garage door monitor, or $1000+ on an appliance or TV expecting to use it once and throw it away.
The problem is that a cloud-controlled garage door opener creates an unnecessary dependency on the continued existence - and good behaviour - of the vendor, unless one thinks that being able to open it from anywhere in the world is an essential feature of a garage door opener.
Even if I just wanted to control the door from my desk at home, I'd still benefit from it being IoT-based.
I agree with you completely. Devices that rely on external servers are not OK. My house's automation uses IoT devices that host their own servers, and/or communicate with those locally that do. I had to build them myself since no company I could find offered anything like this. I'm not a snowflake either, other engineers have done the same.
Currently, IMO, the only reasonable solution to home automation is to do everything yourself, from absolute scratch. Commercial solutions are a combination of insidious spyware and stuff that will become useless when the company becomes acquired, dies, or gets mad at you and shuts down a server.
If your product doesn't need to offer remote control, this isn't a problem. But for many products remote control is a significant USP.
I've built my own IoT systems, and this is one of the first problems that has to be solved.
In an IPv4 world, with domestic networks connected through NAT and a dynamic IP, external servers are going to remain a thing, because the problem cannot be solved without an external server.
If IPv6 ever really takes off every device will have its own address, and then all we'll have to worry about is building bullet proof top tier security into an SoC running some version of Linux that was last patched a few years ago.
There is still the security problem of course.
It can be solved, but the setup UX might not be great. Wouldn't you just have an "Advanced" UI that allows you to input the public IP address of your home network? The IoT device itself could take it from there and set up the correct firewall and forwarding rules over UPnP, or you can do it yourself. It's a one-time setup. Despite it being dynamic, how often does your ISP-provided IPV4 address actually change?
About once a week. This also presupposes that every customer of your home automation gets an external IP address with a router they control. What if you don't? What if you only get an internal or private IP address from your building or whatever?
It obviously drops off sharply when you start getting into the Bill Gates territory where monitors on the walls adjust their artwork to suit the people currently occupying the room, or modifying the light levels, etc. But all the previously mentioned stuff seems like a reasonable thing to want, the same as an automated washing machine or a microwave oven became standard items.
Often the user just needs to find the device on their own internal network: in which case a DNS entry of myserialnumber.myIoT.com returning 192.168.1.104 is fine.
Or if you need need to initiate communication from outside the local network: establish a tunnel (in same style as e.g. ngrok).
I understand that TURN is where you proxy the connection through a third-party server, having given up on establishing a direct connection. While that does require a third-party server, there's no reason that server necessarily has to be directly owned/operated by the company; they could set up P2P relays in their devices, and/or open-source the server software so that it could be run locally.
Rather than baking in a dependency on the vendor of the specific device not going out of business, not stopping support for the device you bought, and not taking a dislike to you, you could depend upon an independent service that all (or at least many) IoT devices use.
https://github.com/n8fr8/talks/blob/master/onion_things/Inte...
The problem with the user setting up his own boxes is that I absolutely will not be bothered with updating the machines. So until there is a solution that lets me have internet connected machines at home that require no maintenance no matter how many years they run, then I'm out of luck.
Fortunately, they did release a patch that bypassed the ping. I continued using it for years, and finally replaced it with a Grace Digital device, which also relies on connecting to Grace Digital on powerup. I know it'll eventually fail when GD moves on.
No small irony (to me) that what simply the easiest method for me, is also one I can replace or migrate in a heartbeat. It's a shame there's no commercial offerings that do the same - there's not many vendors at all I trust to not sunset their service while I'm still using it.
(even giants that can afford it. I've been through dotmac / mobileme and now icloud on Apple, email has been the only service I've used for 10 years without being discontinued. Buying in to home improvements where I can't expect 10 years, isn't something I'm comfortable with)
Recently, a clerk with the local/county municipality showed be a circa 4 am toilet flush and hand washing at my place-- based upon the single spike and amount of water used. Me slightly creeped out. The new remote-read water meters break down usage to at least the hour level -- that's what the interface she was in provided.
I can't go to the can without someone "watching". Do I start "obscuring" or "polluting" my toiletries with random flushes and runs out to the backyard bushes?
Maybe I need to roboticize this with a Raspberry Pi (overkill?) or Arduino. (But what random number generator/source do I use?)
If I had money to burn, I could install a cistern that I would draw into only periodically in large bursts.
My water meter is, via a local 433 MHz uplink, on "the Internet of Things". My friend's dog now has more privacy with regard to his bowel movements.
The clerks have a system at the counter that is already signed in at some degree of administrator level. They can pull up any record they wish, on the spot. There appears to be no concern about logging or auditing of access.
The clerk just took my account number from the bill I brought with me and pulled up my usage for the last couple of days. Swung the screen around and asked whether it looked familiar (it did).
I have access to the same system -- supposedly only for my own account, after I go through an initial sign-up/on process. I wonder how secure that external access to accounts is, but I can't speak to this at this point.
My understanding from reading is also that a lot of these systems transmit unencrypted on the 433 MHz band as they communicate up to local aggregators. I didn't bring that up with the clerk.
By the way, I was given no choice to opt-out of this deployment.
Actually, it's even possible to identify certain devices by eye if you have a sufficiently detailed log (I could, for example, distinguish a coffee machine, a dishwasher and a fridge, as well as lights with different wattages, at a resolution of 1-2 measurements/s). Their patterns are quite distinguishable.
Edit: Here's the screenshot of usage data they sent me when I inquired [2]. The dropoff on 7/25 is when our family member shut off water to the running toilet.
So the cloud services must be continually supported by selling new devices at an exponentially increasing rate to support both old and new customers.. In other markets this is called a pyramid scheme where new investors pay off old investors...
I will not buy a IoT product that does not some with a Self Hosted management option, preferably open source, but at minimum installable binaries to run on my own server. If they want to provide their own service for the less technical clients more power to them, but for me self hosted or no buy
In addition, there are things called annuities, where the purchase price today can have enough set aside to be self-sustaining. Not saying they've done that in this case, but it's not outside the realm of possibility.
Why the hell do I need cloud storage at all for a fucking garage door opener?
So it's quite normal to have the device poll a hosted service, waiting for a callback, and the cellular application reaches the same hosted service. But to do so, you need a dependable and trustworthy hosted service.
But the issue goes somewhat further. Why does a garage door opener needs to be app dependant in the first place? I don't mean to come out as a luddite and can totally see a place for app driven objects in an IoT network, specifically in the scope of home automation - and control.
But for a garage door opener? Why exactly does it need to be controlled by an app? Do you ever need to control your garage door, while, for example at work? Isn't that just adding an additional layer of complexity, potential problems and a vengeful company between you and your garage door?
(for the actual value of this, I guess you'd have to ask the people who bought it. But replacing your 'clicker' with your phone, does appear to be the entire goal of the product - and "not in wifi range" could mean 100 meters away just as easily as 100 miles away)
Use cases include
- Closing the door because you forgot to close it when you left, or a child forgot to close and you notice on your Security system
- Monitoring your system remotely and letting in 3rd parties with out giving them access directly
- getting alerts when your door is open and closed
The potential cost would still outweigh the use I would get out from it. But that's strictly me speaking. Other people may totally see it the other way 'round.
But then I need to be able to open a connection from my phone to the device. With NATs, Dynamic IPs, ISP configured firewalls/routers and so on, this is decidedly non-trivial. Sure, you and I are smart enough to hack something together that will probably work, but end users aren't.
There's always a "but". ISPs need more regulation. They need to be carriers of bits, and they should be forced to hand out fixed IP addresses (IPV6 makes this trivial) or even blocks /8 to homes. In the meantime there is dynamic DNS. It seems like a better idea to fix the problems standing in the way than to run every IoT device through remote servers. If you do that, you're making a choice and it's not in the customers best interest.
I for one will never participate in IoT that works the way these things do today. My furnace needs to fucking work all the time. Having a fancy NEST fail without a network connection is not an option. A simple mercury switch is more reliable and doesn't collect information about me.
https://blog.torproject.org/blog/quick-simple-guide-tor-and-...
...and make that server public-facing. One problem solved, a million security issues gained.
Granted, I put words in your mouth there.
But if you put such an attack surface in your device, you need to be really sure to secure it well. Especially for the case when your company goes out of business, but your customers' devices stay up.
Dynamic DNS. Learned about this the other day from a coworker who sets up his own stuff and connects remotely by phone. You don't get a choice on having a port open - there has to be a way to connect from the outside. Making both the user and the device connect to "the cloud" to get in touch with each other is not more secure, it's less secure - see pissed off company killing a garage door opener.
Expose the shitty insecure software to the internet directly, the theory goes, and successful attacks are inevitable.
I'm not aware of a robust solution for IoT device discovery that doesn't use a cloud based system of some sort. All the alternatives are fiddly or vulnerable to weird router/ISP configurations. Not ideal when you want your product to be seamless.
Let IoT developers develop against the protocol and then consumers can pick a provider to run their IoT hub.
i.e. I go to my garage app and plugin iot://firstname_lastname@iot_hub_provider.com and then that does the heavy lifting of cloud connecting the device and allowing the app to communicate with it.
With a bit of effort, you can have a service that is 1) nearly invisible to anyone not 'in the know', 2) allows incoming global connections without opening any ports, and 3) is extremely-well firewalled from any client lacking a manually-loaded decryption key.
It's not easy, even for technical users, but it can be achieved with 'stealth' Authenticated Tor Onion Services[0]. This does not open any ports, although decryption keys must be manually loaded onto client devices. Crucially, though, any client not in possession of the decryption key can't even determine which Tor introduction point relays need to be contacted in order to set up a rendez-vous with the Onion Service, let alone know what to put in their INTRODUCE2 cells to actually authenticate themselves to the Onion Service.
I make considerable use of this scheme for all sorts of applications and it works very well around the globe, though sometimes slowly and with high latency. The only real catch is that serious censorship evasion (China, Kazakhstan, Gestapo Corporate Firewall) requires using bridges with timing obfuscation, which adds complexity and maintenance burden.
I think there's considerable potential for truly privacy- and security-conscious IoT products using this scheme. All you need is to display a QR code the user can scan on their client device in order to load the service hostname and key. Users run open source server software on their home PC with a bundled Tor. Bonus: Tor use is de-stigmatized and normalized, and Tor traffic increases, improving all users' privacy.
[0]: AKA HiddenServiceAuthorizeClient in 'stealth' mode, in torrc. See also: https://gitweb.torproject.org/torspec.git/tree/rend-spec.txt
There are many cases where the cell phone won't be in the same WiFi of the appliance and on those cases you can:
1 - use some intermediate service: cell phone app <--> cloud <--> appliance
2 - Cell phone app <--> VPN to your WiFi network <--> appliance
3 - Cell phone app <--> router/modem with open ports or redirect ports ou DMZ <--> appliance.
The solution "1" is under your (seller) control, so that it's easy to provide.
Solutions 2 and 3 (and perhaps some others) need intervention from the customer, in some complicated settings. Use it and you'll surely limit your market.
The first (second?) company that creates a protocol fro their modem/router that allows a simple configuration of IoT devices to your cell will make money. You know, like WPS was created to make it easy to connect new devices to your WiFi.
(Ways to have fun with that will be countless too.)
I love Cloud to Butt.
If it were some medical device, you would expect that its supported by a large company, the device has gone trough mandatory certifications, etc. But that would also show in the price of the product, or the volume at which those products are produced and sold.
The mistake is expecting that every gadget maker provides service such a multi-billion dollars corporation can. It simply can't, its a single-person company and that person has its limits. So you either have to deal with some roughness, or you dismiss everything not backed by a large enough company. Not that big companies can't be assholes, they just know how to be assholes less personally.
Even if the device is well-designed and doesn't malfunction, a device might function all-too-well, and act against the consumer who owns the object.
When you have a smart device that's smart enough to be too smart to let you freely benefit from it, everything becomes a rental at best.
If we let this happen, it could very well be a step backward from the status quo of planned obsolescence. (planned obsolescence is also a bad thing, just in case anyone needs that spelled out)
What does this mean?
Consider game consoles. The original xbox would just boot up the game that was in the drive and that was it. The newer ones will go to a home screen full of ads. You have to create a microsoft account to start playing. The game will take several hours to update before you can start (and because of this games are now released in an unfinished state because they count on customers updating.) And it was going to be so that you have to have the internet on all the time so it can check if your game is used or not (fortunately they disabled that after overwhelming protest.)
This story brought back memories. I supported software shortly after graduation and the lead developer once joked with me about how we ought to just give people their money back if they couldn't make it work after a certain period of time. Nobody ever let him near customers without supervision. But even he, when confronted with customers disparaging his work, could cope by hand-holding the customer or asking them how they thought the program ought to work instead.
Garadget will fail.
Seems like good advice, except for the part where it's basically running from interpersonal conflict instead of dealing with it. In some situations with really unbalanced people it's the best option, though.
But in all seriousness, I wonder at which point the decision to rescind an IoT 'service' becomes unacceptable. Obviously doing so with a medical device or a moving vehicle during operation would be criminal. But how about a smart home lock? A security camera / alarm system?
"We can disable the ignition but not while you're
driving," Melanie Boudreau, a spokesperson at IMETRIK, a
Canadian maker of starter interrupt devices that run
around $100 each, told Fortune. "We don't want to kill
you."
[1]: http://abcnews.go.com/Business/Autos/story?id=3706113&page=1 [2]: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2010/03/disabling_car... [3]: https://www.wired.com/2015/07/hackers-remotely-kill-jeep-hig...
Seriously?
I think the support guy/founder should have taken the high road, for reasons that are all too obvious based on the number of HN stories I've seen about this.
But, if my kids ever spoke to a stranger like this, I'd make them go clean up dog poop in this person's yard and apologize. "C'mon, we're getting on a plane!"
And further, if your opinion of a product is that it is a "piece of shit", why would you get mad when the product is disabled and you are offered a refund? Are you expecting them to turn a piece of shit into a unicorn? If it's a piece of shit, a refund is exactly what you wan't, isn't it?
Amateur
The interesting question to me is what exactly you buy for $99: just the device ? Is the cloud-based service included in the price also? Especially since the developer can only make an assumption as to how long (in years) a customer will be using the service.
There's no a absolute stance on refund for bricked devices.
In this case the device was blacklisted on the server side. For a device to be denied access it has to ask for access first which a bricked device would not be able to do.
So for $99 you clearly bought not only a device, but also the required service.
What happens if the company goes out of business? Does the app require a server to be active in order to use the App?
The app requires a server component as does any consumer friendly product with mobile access. [...] The main server component is maintained by the Particle and pre-paid for the life of the device. [...]
[https://www.amazon.com/forum/-/Tx1SJ70QRGDYZAY/ref=ask_dp_dp...]