Penske rental truck shut down remotely on convoy activist driving to Washington, D.C.
(citizenfreepress.com)
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It's not the technology itself. It's the specific implementation of technology. Take this story out of Texas from last summer, where the power company decided to remotely adjust thermostats to help balance the load. Or this other story from November about an issue with an app locking people out of their Teslas, because your phone acts as the key.
The issue isn't inherent to thermostats, cars, or anything else. It's the fact that people keep buying up (eagerly buying up, in many cases) the new cool thing that has a bunch of unnecessary bells and whistles and smartphone integration. Do you really need to be able to control your thermostat from anywhere? No. Do you really need to be able to remote start your car with your phone? No.
Yet people look at this and say "Oh, that's so cool, I always have my phone with me and so I can remotely control and monitor everything!", utterly ignoring (or being ignorant of) the fact that every time you add another online hook into something you create another back door which lets other people get in.
No, Google, I do not need a freakin jacket with bluetooth built into it. Literally no one ever needs a jacket with bluetooth built into it. If you need to adjust the volume on your music that badly, just stop your bike, adjust the volume, and then start biking again! But, apparently that's too complex or too annoying for people, so now we have bluetooth jackets.
I'd say it's more than not needing a blue tooth jacket (which, to be sure, is highly unnecessary), it's giving control to someone else for the sake of convenience.
There is literally no technical reason that a phone needs to be locked to a carrier, or that installing a new OS isn't as easy as on a PC. But we accept these always connected, always physically present, devices instead of demanding to be able to swap out parts ourselves. We accept paying hundreds of dollars for something with which we could be charged for "jailbreaking" if we try to put our own software on.
A bluetooth jacket would be fine if we could simply buy a generic bluetooth kit and hook it up to our phones ourself, but allowing big tech to monopolize it means they own it while we pay for it.
People volunteered themselves to those thermostat programs in order to get better rates on electricity. If they didn't understand what that was about, well, they're dumb.