Having someone use a remote kill command for an item you bought for reasons other than imminent threats to safety ought to be illegal. This shouldn’t be treated differently from a car salesman bricking your windshield after you drive off the lot.
this post was submitted on 02 Nov 2025
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In germany there's the "Computer sabotage" crime.
Is it still sabotage if the only thing they have sold is a license to use their product not the product itself. That is still their property.
I'm no law expert, but as far as i know, there were already similiar cases. Reasoning (german law): Software required to run the product is not "licensed to use" but part of the product, which was bought, belongs the user and not the company. Remotely making the device unusable would indeed violate that term.
Hopefully, such terms would violate the above law and not hold up against it.
At least in EU the manufacturer can't revoke licenses on sold physical products with no cause (can't expire before EOL either) and can't remove advertised functionality. If any feature is conditional or temporary it has to be disclosed before sale.
The issue you’ll run into is that the data runs through their servers, and you ages to let them kill it off. Should that be legal? I honestly don’t know. But they shouldn’t force you to use their servers to begin with, which would make the entire issue moot.
Conversely, instead of blocking the data transfer, have it send false data. Maybe a few drop table inserts.
I do this when a job makes me install productivity tracking software. Surprisingly easy to gin up fake screenshots and JSON of your activities and inject it into the program. All it does is upload the records from a user folder every X minutes
Spam them so hard they'll blacklist your device
In case you have a robot vacuum and want to run it cloudless you can check Valetudo.
It's been running my vacuum the last 4 years and I couldn't find any downsides (There are several extra functions if you like to tinker around with home assistant and the likes)
If you have any doubts or need assistance with installing it, I would be happy to give you a hand :-)
behavioral surplus is the most important thing for corporations in 21st century. Simple as that. They basically collect people's personal data, where they go, their routines and stuff, and render them and use them for efficient advertising. Google is the founder of this system.
You could just setup a dedicated VLAN without Internet access to prevent this. Right?
Maybe in some cases. My robot stores it's smart map on the cloud, which means of you cut off the internet it loses a lot of features.
No, because that's what he did
...so the joke goes...