Companies just don't get enough resistance to this behaviors if more people went against them things wouldn't be in the state they are now.
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With Philips you don't need to only make an account, you'll need yet another "Bridge" device (costing about as much as your lamp give or take) to get all the features.
IIRC, Phillips devices use Zigbee and can be controlled with stuff like Home Assistant and OpenHAB.
Apparently there are toothbrushes that use AI. What fuckery is this?
Not just an AI toothbrush, an A.I. toothbrush for 🧠 geniuses 🌟.
I took this the other day while toothbrush shopping so my partner and I could laugh about it. I bought the cheapest Sonicare they make and it works as well as every other one I've had for the last decade, but without bluetooth, wifi, AI, an app, etc.
(And it's still overpriced garbage. My last one just stopped working out of the blue, almost 2 years to the day after I bought it, right outside the warranty period. Planned obsolescence is an exact science these days.)
I have one of those. My partner got a pair of them with a heavy discount and it is an excellent toothbrush
I couldn’t tell you what it does differently i would need to download an app to see which is never gonna happen. I am using it as am bog standard electric brush and i cant be arsed to read the manual.
Theres a small screen that will display how long you brushed that shows you an frowning face if you cut it short. Il leave it up to others to judge how useful that is for an adult.
My dentist has no complaints and that is really the best i can ask so yeah its a great normal electronic toothbrush if you literally ignore the ai part of it.
"Tomar, what would you say if a lightbulb in your house grew a mouth and asked you to make an account to make it purple?"
I have a lightbulb that I can change the colour temperature of. There's no internet or app connection, you toggle through the different states by rapidly turning it off and on again. Whoever designed it deserves a medal
The real question is why our government in the USA hasn't stepped in and made any protections for our data, which would solve this issue entirely. Apps like Temu or Character.AI have very sketchy data management and privacy practices, you have no idea what they're really doing with your data, it's required to make an account for both of them. Clearly they are selling them and obtaining lots of your data to do all sorts of things with. Frankly, I don't think it should be legal to obtain huge amounts of people's data, specifying nothing about what it is actually, truly being used for
My girlfriend always jokes with me that despite being tech-competent I am an old Luddite about tech. It is never more true than when something asks me to make an account.
Finding a fucking living room lamp where you can change brightnes, was quite a search to exclude all the iot devices. That most online shops have no filters for iot, doesn't help.
I kind of wonder whether it'd be worthwhile to have a certification agency that just certifies things for privacy and non-cloud-connectivity or the like. Trying to dig through spec sheets and reviews to figure out how a product functions is a pain. I'd rather pay slightly more to just look for some privacy certification on a product. I don't really want to try to keep up with the latest privacy issues present in a given product category, would rather have a specialist do that.
Like, let me just look for a "PC-24-O" (Privacy Certification 2024 Offline) label or something on products. Saves me time. Also would let vendors like Amazon let me filter products for that certification.