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I agree that it's bullshit, but a boycott is not going to accomplish anything. To many devices work like this (phone home else brick), and too few people care enough to allow this failure mode to influence their behavior. Most people just want the shiny thing.

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A boycott perfectly accomplishes this. I don't want to purchase devices that arbitrarily shut down. It protects me from spending money on bad devices and from people that create devices and companies with bad practices.

Someone needs to make a "yelp for business owners" where you can review previous businesses all the directors have been involved in, and if they treated customers and suppliers in a decent way.

Even a tiny bit of attaching moral standards to individuals in the business will have a big effect - people will leave a company if they see something immoral happening, so as not to hurt their own employability.

This sounds like LinkedIn without all the fake positivity

Don't care. Responsible business owners will take basic steps to ensure customers of the business are not screwed over when the business folds.

That could consist of opensourcing the code, handing the servers over to someone else to run, making the product have a fallback mode where it runs without a server, etc.

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