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Comment by Renaud | Hacker News Reader

Any device that requires someone to install and app and register to make it work should have a prominent label on the box.

There should be a labelling standard for this where the manufacturer must disclose if any registration is required to operate the device to its full potential, if any app or special software is needed other than a system driver, if any phone-home data is being sent, and what data is actually sent, when and why.

"Buyer beware" but most of the time you have no idea what the experience will be like. It's usually not disclosed on the box, reviews rarely mention it and I'd like to have a sure way of being informed before I make my purchase.

It's a similar thing with software, software and apps that require registration for no other reason than add you to their marketing list, but it's particularly egregious with physical items.

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Then every printer would just have the warning, making it useless like the California Prop 65 warning label. Seems like everything is labeled with a prop 65 warning, and I for one completely ignore it because it doesn’t provide useful information (beyond ‘everything will kill you, good luck’). The printer manufacturers would say that the registration is super important and it’s critical to get their spammy low ink level warnings or something.

I shopped specifically for one that didn’t do this. They are around my, canon G6020 does not require me to use an app and I never registered anything. It’s internet connected, so I’m sure it’s sending them info, but no GPS and no app.

I won't say so. I own two Brother printers; both worked with standard Windows or Linux printing systems (with a simple driver because they talk PostScript), and did not require me to install any special apps. They of course asked to install things like toner monitoring utilities, etc, but I politely declined, and everything just works anyway.

+1. I installed nothing for my brother printer and it works with cups.

Me too

+1 The Brother printers are awesome and just work as printers should do.

Once advantage is that it leaves the door open for a company to market printers against the label. It could be similar to a 'GMO free' type premium. It seems there are many here who would pay extra for that.

One can create such a labelling standard by starting or partnering with a standards organization.

"This device certified not to compromise your privacy" could be a good selling point for a printer, especially if half of the printers have it and half don't.

iPhone boxes have something like "Apple ID and acceptance of EULA and privacy policy required" printed on them, among other things.

You can always download the instructions from the web. It should contain all the info you need to decide.

Of course it won't help when you are shopping and looking around in a store for some reason.

You said it like that advice is useful when shopping online, buyer to download and read a whole manual to make the decision?

I regularly download the manual prior to making large purchase, such as appliances, home control systems, etc. Checking out the app itself is good too.

For printers, I also recommend pricing out five years of supplies. I bought a printer that cost 5x as much as one with similar specs, but ends up costing less in supplies.

Because that is good advice for want of a better workaround. You act like that is a huge burden, it's typically very easy to do! Searching for a model number and 'manual' will get you to a manual, most manuals are very short and quick to parse especially if all you are looking for is 'will this require an app' or similar.

So, yeah, it is good advice if the outcome is important to you and you dont know a better way to protect yourself from accidentally buying something like that. Unless you know a better way and are holding out on everyone?

If you don't want to install the app or create an account you can return the device at no cost. I don't think most box stores will fight you on this. Online sellers usually will, return shipping can be very expensive.

The time spent trying to set it up is worth requiring a label on the box. I sort of assume it is already required. You need to agree to conditions to create an account anywhere, surely a product needs to tell you about it's data vacuum before you spend hundreds of dollars on it.

Depends on the country you're in. Doubt you'd have much luck returning it for this reason in Indonesia.

They have no buyer protection at all? A jurisdiction which breaks the assumption you are sold working objects is a problem, I suppose.

No monetary cost, but there's definitely a cost. If a product blatantly disguises the fact that it spies on your location, then that's a form of deceit. As a result of their attempted deception, I have lost out on the time spent comparing the product against others, the time spent acquiring it, the time spent setting it up, and any opportunity cost of that time.

Not everything is measured in dollars, and getting back the dollars spent as a result of deceitful advertising does not undo the damage caused by the deceit.

You can actually measure time in dollars pretty often. And with all the time spent you mentioned for returning an item like this that time is likely as expensive as the printer itself.

It's not spying, it's a mutual agreement, you deliberately accepted the terms and installed the app yourself.

Are you suggesting that an app that is purported to help you interact with your printer, but does not do that very well, but does track literally everything it can about you instead so that the parent company can sell that information, is not spying? That is deceptive.

I think people are conflating my interpretation of personal agency with agreeing with the practice; I don't buy products that do these things, I'm merely explaining that by using this item and agreeing to their terms, it is in fact not spying, because you're informed ahead of time what will happen. Someone not reading the contracts they sign does not void the terms of the contracts.

> Someone not reading the contracts they sign does not void the terms of the contracts.

In some cases, it does. In medical trials, you need "informed consent", and not just regular consent. It doesn't matter what papers are signed, if a patient isn't informed what the trial is testing, what known side effects there are, and what alternatives there are, it doesn't count.

More relevant to this issue, GDPR also uses the concept of informed consent. Under GDPR, tracking is legal only if consent is informed and freely given. The example printer fails both these conditions. It is not informed consent, because the tracking is not prominently disclosed to the user, and merely mentioning it in the fine print is insufficiently prominent. It is not freely-given consent, because a service being conditional on acceptance of tracking means that there is coercion to accept the tracking.

My viewpoint on the ethics tends to follow somewhat close to the GDPR's requirements. Even if somebody clicked through a 50-page EULA, that does not give informed permission to track somebody, and so it is still spying.

I never disagreed with this. My point is, performing a return is a strong signal of dislike. Box stores hate returns as do online sellers. Failing anything else (because face it, ranting about it on the internet and pointing out the moral failures of a business model is not doing it) returning it is the best you can do.

People are also unlikely to return because they don't realize tracking exists. The iPhone permissions is a perfect example of this. People "knew" these apps were tracking them but didn't internalize them. When the UI changed to better highlight the tracking people did internalize it and denied it.

At the end of the day it's a team of psychologists, computer scientists, and super computers against one human. It's not a fair fight. There are plenty of dark patterns to make you not internalize the tracking. So while you're technically right, no one expects to see this happen in practice because your model isn't accounting for this.

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