I tend to agree, though I tried to do some searches for a law citation here, but struggled to find anything concrete. I imagine this will be a big area of research and exploration for law in the coming years.
Some interesting scenarios to consider: If I visit a friend's house, and I start getting targeted ads for a service I didn't subscribe to without prior consent or my knowledge, can I sue her/him? What about a scenario where some service collects my data, said service is hacked, and someone commits identity theft on me, who is liable for damages? Do I need my buddy to sign a waiver when he visits to play some Xbox for a bit?
Wasn't there a story recently about android phones still being tracked and tracking wifi hotspots even with wifi turned off? I believe location services still works pretty well even with GPS and wifi off.
I would imagine if you walk into a home with google's AI doodads all over the place, you're gonna be picked up.
Yes, there was recently a question of how Android knew someone's location with such high resolution, even when wifi and GPS were both turned off. The answer was a passive probing of wifi identifiers and using those against the Google SID to location database even when wifi was turned off.
There was even a note about this feature in the privacy policy, IIRC.
Perhaps people should be required to post a notice on their front door if their house has a Google surveillance device in it (or I suppose, verbally inform every visitor). It's common (and often required) for businesses to post notice that people on the premises are under video surveillance.
I have a couple of cameras, and at least one visitor has been uncomfortable with their presence, despite the fact they're not sending the data to a third party.
Yes, Thinkpads have traditionally had the best linux hardware support of all laptops, ever since there were x86 laptops (the easiest installs were thinkpads, and toshiba, early on).
Now, this piece of hardware removes support for the standard way to access the hard drive. Why did they do that? Hardware engineer couldn't fix a glitch in a new chipset in time to fix the issue in time to ship? Exceedingly unlikely. You only change those chips when you have to, because of cost or design constraints, and Lenovo is shipping other, similar hardware that does work with standard storage drivers.
Someone (one person!) managed to flash the BIOS to add AHCI support, but certainly I don't need to point out that this level of tinkering is equivalent to a crypto secure boot situation for well over 99% of laptop-buyers. That is, they would not be able to defeat either.
Now, a large portion of those buyers are not even aware of linux, so it's very easy for them not to care. Some people take umbrage to the argument-from-not-caring (I've got mine! My video plays fine! etc.), not because you have shown that their position is wrong, but because it seems to them that you are arguing that you understand that they are screwed, you are not, and "too bad for you".
Interestingly, despite Thinkpads being the best at running Linux over the years, they never officially supported it. At some point they began cracking down on it.
At last job, we had to wipe machines back to the version of Windows that came with them in order to get Lenovo to honor the NBD support we paid for, even when it was obviously not a software glitch (displays dying or DVD drives not reading discs in any OS). We kept a couple spare hard drives around with vanilla Windows installs for this reason.
We were pretty excited when Dell started shipping their Developer models. Told Lenovo to pound sand when it came time to refresh.
I use mine solely to make sure I don't miss calls texts, and appointments. But you know yourself. Would you be tempted to load flappy bird onto it right away? Would you forward your facebook notifications to it?
Fortunately, there isn't enough screen real estate and input methods to get a lot of gaming going.
When you visit you friend's house, the data is not under their control, it is under Google's control.
Therefore, Google has a WAY bigger responsibility than most people realize, once they decided to collect this data.