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HP’s 'All-In' Printer Rental Watches Everything You Print, Tells HP All About It
(www.extremetech.com)
this post was submitted on 07 Mar 2024
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If anyone seriously believes HP will develop two copies of operating software, one with "send everything to HP" and one without, they are delusional.
It may very well be that there will be a contract saying something completely different than what is happening in those machines.
I can’t tell if this is bait with an aptly named account or a genuine mistake. In case it’s the latter: they wouldn’t necessarily have to develop two copies of the software. There are multiple ways of making the same software work for both without spying on the corporate customers. One of the simplest is called a feature flag and is in essence just a value that tells the software if it should use a particular feature or not. Whether or not they spy on corporate users is not a question of the technology, but rather their integrity and fear of getting caught.
Oh sure. They could do this. But they don't.
But there is absolutely no way to verify what they are doing, no fear of getting caught and thus there is no incentive to behave with integrity.
At least my state of knowledge is that this: https://reproducible-builds.org/ isn't fully functional and even if it were what HP does on their machines is closed source stuff.
And even if there were companies or organizations that are big enough to enforce transparency, like a big multinational or a government, there will be plenty of cases where smaller companies with sensitive data can't, like doctors offices or independent lawyers.
It is way easier to charge for a "data privacy" subscription tier and then still just not honoring the wording of that, than to actually put in the effort.
Sure, I’m not arguing whether they are respecting the agreement, just whether the software would be much of a factor if any in that decision.