I wish more companies would stand their ground and refusing caving to a vocal, but demonstrably toxic minority.
In this case, Ubiquiti’s actions are particularly irksome because they’re changing a product after its sale to do something that would have caused many customers to avoid purchasing it in the first place if it had shipped that way — and without giving customers an easy way to turn it off.
I respectfully disagree. It is also the fact that there's telemetry. It is not OK for me to punch you in the face just because I tell you I'm going to do it first. You shouldn't have to mitigate that risk. The risk wouldn't exist if I weren't punching you in the face.
Lack of Transparency: No specific details on what or when they transmit.
Lack of Communication: Didn't tell customers they were putting this in place.
Forcing customers to employ additional network security on a network device if they don't trust what you're doing ... which is hard to do given the lack of transparency and communication.
>there must be some grievous harm telemetry causes that I am not aware of.
What you're not aware of is the same thing the rest of us aren't aware of ... and that is what is actually sent and what triggers that etc.
That is telemetry.
That's more than plausible, it already happened.
They fixed that, but now, what's in the telemetry they're sending? Any bugs causing it to send PII in any circumstance?
The phoning home isn't the issue - it's the lack of communicating it and lack of offering an ability to turn it off that is the problem. A vocal minority may grab pitchforks if it's opt-out rather than opt-in but most would be fine with it.... Ubiquiti did it one worse and didn't even offer opt-out.
Instead you have your network device provider saying - well if you don't want our devices to call home use another device in front of us to block it.
So the core issue is trust and basic respect for your clearly technical and security minded customers.
It's your responsibility as the manufacturer to ask for permission if you want to observe someone's private property in any way.
> demonstrably toxic minority.
Standing up for property rights is toxic? Just because software made it easy to observe and/or control a device after the 1st sale doesn't give you the right to eavesdrop on other people's property (or vandalize it with an unwanted, forced update).
I'm ok with them actually collecting data, as long as they're:
* Open about what actuall data is being collected. * Open about them actually collecting data and not sneaking it in. * Providing a way to opt-out. * Adding the proper GDPR documentation around this so as clearly not to break the law. As it is it's a grey zone, why not be clear about it.