On May 15th, my house will stop working. My landscape lighting will stop turning on and off, my security lights will stop reacting to motion, and my home made vacation burglar deterrent will stop working. This is a conscious intentional decision by Google/Nest.
To be clear, they are not simply ceasing to support the product, rather they are advising customers that on May 15th a container of hummus will actually be infinitely more useful than the Revolv hub.
This should be absolutely illegal. I’m pretty sure Google has some EULA bullshit that “allows” them to do it, but EULAs are legal wet sand, and honestly, I just don’t care. The fact Google can just get away with this shows you just how utterly warped and inherently – I’m using that word again, it’s been a while – evil they really are.
These companies literally do not care about you. The sooner you accept that, the less attached and to and blinded by these companies you’ll be.
Why the hell should this be illegal?
It’s the customer’s fault that they depended on a cloud service–a cloud service which, in fact, functioned for the duration of the warranty. For this to be illegal, the government would have to have the power to compel a company to provide a service. This is the same concept that the FBI tried to push when “forcing” Apple to break into that iPhone which everyone, including this site, hated. With the shoe on the other foot, now you go crying to Big Brother?
You see.. this the problem with knee-jerk idiots running off at the mouth, it leads to stupid laws being pushed when manipulative politicians catch wind of how to gain their support. The lesson to be learned here is not to make this illegal, but to take responsibility for putting yourself in that position in the first place.
There already is a solution for this. It’s called Freedom of Speech. Spread word that these are the fuckers who cut support for a product whose userbase depended on them. Spread word that this new company is the same. Don’t go crying to the government to make more stupid laws, punish the company your damn self.
That’s not a solution at all. What is it with free marketeers and their hardons for Social Darwinism?
Oh right, so go cry to Big Brother. That’ll solve it.
I’m not in favour of making something like this illegal either, but that’s the problem with Social Darwinists – if we’re not with you, we’re against you.
I’m for alternative solutions. We are moving into a service oriented era whether we like it or not. Traditional consumer protection, just like conventional free market wisdom, is not designed for that. It makes just as little sense to make shutting down a for-profit service illegal as it is to just expect everyone else to have to sacrifice their rights of expectation just so Social Darwinists can continue to get off on the idea of this perfect self-correcting system that never existed and can’t exist.
Maybe a way forward is for a regulation (oh no!) that says such a service, if it were to be abandoned, has to be spun off into its own thing. Or to have a clear migration plan to the new service that doesn’t put undue loss onto consumers before they had a chance to exercise their right of free speech.
Edited 2016-04-08 00:46 UTC
And where in my post did I ever say that I was against regulation or some other form of alternative solution? Your initial post made no attempt to clarify what you would suggest in its place, instead only went full offensive against the “Social Darwinist” strawman you built for yourself.
FWIW, if said spreading of the word fails to have any impact, then by all means suggest an alternative and I’d be up to consider it. I have no dog in the fight if such reviews are the answer or not, like you’re trying to label me as. But to make it illegal and have it considered a crime? Now that’s where we’ll have disagreements.
But alas, you don’t seem to be up to consider such a middle-ground, rather you’re more interested in your crusade against these so called “Social Darwinists”. By all means, have at it–just know that it’s your own purpose built strawman and not my own.
And who would maintain and pay for the service? If a company goes bankrupt, would the state have to keep the lights on?
You can’t force a business to run a loss-making service, migration plan or not.
I think this is just an example of the dangers of being at the bleeding edge of technology. There will always be risks. They simply bought into the “losing format”.
If you were in line buying Blueray/HD-DVD on launch day, your more likely to get stung than waiting to see which format won. Same has happened here, except there are Many formats for home automation Nest/Ecobee/Hive/Tado/Honeywell/etc. I can guarantee you this won’t be the last to fall at a hurdle. Over the next decade I would be amazed if more than one or two survive.
They don’t need to continue providing the service, just provide all the information necessary for someone else to do so instead.
I quite like the idea of home automation, but not of doing it through someone else’s server. I want a standalone device which does not depend on a third party service, or a device that communicates with a server that i can host myself.
If it’s run as a service, it should be paid for as a service, i.e. on a monthly basis. That way, if the thing goes titsup the consumer isn’t out of pocket.
To have the consumer pay up front, then pull the plug on the service is the issue here (at least to me).
I think it’s one of those idealistic things. As much as I’d like to believe that people learn from mistakes, and that the market will self-correct over time… the evidence just isn’t there to support it. The people make the same mistakes, and the system does not fix as a result.
I’m not intimately familiar with this product – how much of it is actually cloud-driven? Seems like most of it is controlling local devices that could be done without a centralized hub in the cloud. If that’s the case, and they’re still disabling it, that’s pretty shitty, IMO. At least they could leave stuff on that doesn’t require a cloud connection.
If, on the other hand, most of the infrastructure is in the cloud, that’s the kind of risks you take when you buy a device like this. Pretty much anything that depends on cloud functionality will have a limited shelf life. And short of completely doing away with all cloud services, I dunno how you fix that.
Edited 2016-04-08 00:21 UTC
…because more and more, the physical devices we buy are intimately dependent for their function on network services that (a) only exist while there is a profitable company to maintain them and (b) even when they don’t get shut down, the services may evolve away from what they were when older hardware was sold, also leaving it useless.
One way of dealing with sort of thing from a consumer protection standpoint would be to require companies to place the source code for the services and the device into escrow, to be released as FOSS in the event that they cease supporting the hardware or discontinue the service. Then at least there is the possibility of interested consumers with the necessary expertise could revive the infrastructure needed to make the devices useful.
rafial,
That’s a pretty good idea. If a manufacturer wants to drop support (ie because it’s no longer interested or profitable), then the manufacturer must hand over the keys to owners so they can seek their own support options. If manufacturers want to be jerks and keep the keys to themselves, then they must keep supporting the products that they hold the keys to.
Don’t like these terms? Then a manufacturer needs to clearly and explicitly disclose at the point of sale that they reserve the right to brick products once the warranty ends. This way consumers are absolutely clear that the product may stop working with no support options at the manufacturer’s whims. Anything else is contradictory to reasonable consumer expectations.
Thanks for posting this article, Thom. Attention needs to be brought to all these practices, they will become more and more common. I’m genuinely curious if you still think a smarttv built with chromecast is a good idea given that google is in control?
http://www.osnews.com/story/29136/How_Vizio_and_Google_radically_re…
This is exactly why I keep pounding on the importance of open platforms where owners are in control.
Edited 2016-04-08 02:47 UTC
Actually, I think dependency is the real product they are selling. The business model of all “cloud” companies is to get us sufficiently dependent on them for some function of our lives, that they can control us later (e.g., raise prices, change terms of service, sell advertising, etc.).
I have absolutely no interest in handing my data to, and/or allowing myself to be tracked by, any third party. This is why I will never, ever, use “cloud” services for any non-trivial function, if there is any alternative at all.
Pro-Competition,
On the one hand, it’s good that users have to “opt in” to loosing their privacy. But on the other hand, it sucks that home automation features may be limited until you do opt in.
Edited 2016-04-09 05:44 UTC
Or folks could opt for products that aren’t crucially dependant on the cloud or online services to function.
They said https://twitter.com/nestsupport/status/717470755936600064 so there, hope.
Sorry, but it was a really, really stupid move to buy a device whose essential functionality is closely tied to particular company and service. This stupid move called for punishment, and the punishment arrived. Inflicted damage would force a few lucky victims to re-evaluate their attitude towards walled gardens; the others would suffer again, and again^aEUR| until enlightenment comes.
P.S.: Any attempt to charercterize a legal entity as “good” or “evil” is inherently stupid. Only human beings have morality.
Is that “You”, “Tu” or “Vous” obviously they don’t care about Tu, but they could care about Vous. Now I don’t want to be a cheerleader for companies, I think they are driven structurally driven towards selfishness. Nevertheless if you state this as a fact, that is universally true then you let them off the hook and make it more difficult for any company to behave ethically.
It is difficult to argue moral equivalence of something that can’t possibly have moral edge to it. FWIW the difference between North Korea and Norway is nothing but the difference between situations they are in.
In effect you are arguing they are morally equal and the difference comes down to objective conditions. This objective conditions argument has never been predictively successful, because it ignores the contingent nature of history. In reality small institutional differences, ideas, and the actions of individuals, do make a difference. If we applied the objective conditions argument to individuals (where it probably makes more sense) – That the actions of individuals are determined by environment, external, how they were brought up etc and internal, their genes etc (or are random) we could collapse the entire argument for freewill or morality.
As I understand it (warning: no expert at all), in European law there is this thing called the expected lifespan of a device, during which the seller is obliged to fix manufacturing defects or refund the part of the purchase price for the remaining years. For example, if I remember correctly, a TV has the expected lifespan of 10 years, so if your 1000 euro TV breaks down after six years and the seller refuses to replace/repair it you are entitled to a 400 euro refund.
I think that (in Europe) you could argue that the expected lifespan of a home automation device is measure in decades, not years, so the refund would be over 90% in this case. Good luck, though, in trying to get it as very few people are prepared to go to court in such cases.
In the US, this is just waiting for a class action lawsuit, I suspect one could even apply a similar argument there.
Edited 2016-04-08 00:57 UTC
Whenever I see this sort of thing, I’m never sure whether to feel pity for people who can’t hack together their own self-contained alternative or anger that I’m forced to do so in order to get what I want.
No shit? Huge, multinational corporations doesn’t care about the individual user? News at 11.
And obviously some people (Nest “owners” in this case) will only learn that the hard way, if they learn at all.
There those of us who don’t hand over house keys to a corporation…
Cloud may have its uses. Running my house ain’t one of them.
p.s.: This point is not about consumer protection issues. Nest may or may not be at fault on that front. I’m not a lawyer to comment.
Next time build a reliable automation from hardware and software YOU own. Like some arduinos/raspberry pis and free software.
The way i did it / am doing it …
Get some arduinos and do it yourself.
Use CAN or ethernet.
If you want to make it into something fancy and want some nice web-connected interface, get an rpi for that and write some simple php code for it.
KISS
Edited 2016-04-08 06:48 UTC
And you expect the average consumer to do this… how, exactly?
You’d have a point, were it not for the fact that home automation requires some handy work anyway.
If you can mount a socket, run a cable, place a fixture, etc etc, then you can do this.
https://www.google.be/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=…
No. Many people who are amazing at running wires, cables, and sockets can’t do jack with software. Being handy and mechanical doesn’t translate into being able to install and configure the software side of a system, sorry. Now, if one were to sell pre-configured boards that are ready to go, and offer installation service and support for said packages… then you’d get somewhere with the average home owner.
But that’s just the thing.
If you’d have bothered to look at the google link, then you’d see there are plenty of shields, boards, modular systems, etc ready to buy.
Software only has to be written once and shared, the wiring has to be done for every installation…
The “average consumer” is a fucking retard who could use the mental exercise.
Wow, think a lot of yourself, don’t you? I’m beginning to despise the tech community for attitudes such as this.
Good luck to all those who fall for Apple’s constant prodding to back up all personal data on their servers!
What has this thread got to do with apple? This is Google/Alphabet we are talking about here.
You don’t have to use iCloud btw. But it sure makes restoring your data to a new one if it gets nicked very easy. (as happened to my iPod last year. The thief probably thought that it was an iPhone…).
Got a new one on the insurance and restored it from iCloud. Did what it said on the tin.
so did Apple drop any hints that iCloud was going away? Please tell us because this is potentially bigger news than the topic of this thread.
Any time I do any OS update on my old iOS device or on my MacBook they prod me again to sign on to iCloud, almost warning me of the consequences if I refuse to.
From what I hear it is standard practice among Apple device users to keep their stuff backed up on iCloud.
After all it is very cumbersome to move a file, or data in general, from one Apple device to the other without going through the cloud.
Makes me feel I do not even own the device I “bought” from them. I just paid hundreds of bucks to obtain the priviledge to use the phone for a period of time the way they tell me to.
What, you never heard of AirDrop?
No. Probably because I stopped using Apple devices a few years ago. At that time I tried to get a Garage Band file from the iPad to the Mac. The whole process was rather a comedy.
But I do know Drag and Drop. That is how I move files in the file browser to and from my mobile devices.
In other words, you post before checking your knowledge. Good to know.
I don’t care about it because it solves a problem I should not have in the first place and I only have if I use Apple devices.
But if it makes the iSheep rejoice, glad for them.
You realise you lost the entire argument by using the term “iSheep”? If your argument hinges on mocking others and feeling superior because you are “clever” enough to avoid [insert company/product/OS name], you’ve already closed yourself down to the point that your opinion is worthless to most open discussions. Labelling people because of their choices – where does that stop? Should we label everyone? “Speccy”, “Blindy”, “Deaf-head”, “Retard”, “Homosexual”… then what? Social demographic? Race? Religion? I mean come on, we could go all the way down and invoke Godwin’s law if you like… because that is the slippery slope you’re travelling towards.
Realise people are different. But feeling smugly superior and pointing out differences is what causes most of the social unrest we see, even to this day. Try to be a better person by actually being the better person. Hint: that’s not calling people names on comments in OS News or any other public forum.
That is hardly a new development.
If you play online video games, the software vendor’s servers will usually shut down when there is no more money to be made.
Usually the vendors have in their ToS a provision that allows them to do this at any time without notice. Should have read that better.
And it reinforces just what folks like the FSF have said all along. People need to be empowered to replace the software on the device with their own code. So they can set up their own servers and have the home automation talk to those. The owner community will decide when the devices are obsolete, not the manufacturer.
If you don’t insist on Free Software in your device, then you deserve no better than Nest customers.
You do have to be a tiny bit silly to make almost every electronic device — entertainment systems, white goods, lighting — dependent on the server of a distant company who is not beholden to you, for literally no functional benefit. All it needed for him to control his home remotely was to be plugged in to his home modem running a simple server programme.
Dells don’t fundamentally depend on a particular online service for the lights to stay on, and you would know that when you bought it, just as the Revolv did depend on a particular online service, and he almost certainly did know that when he bought it.
This story only deserves sympathy if Revolv hid or under-played the nature of its online dependence.
All that said, changing industry practice to keep these kind of services online in some form, FOSS or otherwise, would be a good step. Gilbert should have known better, but not everyone can be expected to.
Even if not hidden, most people don’t truly comprehend what it means to be dependent on n online service like this. People depend on Dropbox, Google Docs, Office 365, and the like quite a lot these days and the fact that these rarely go down, and have never been discontinued, tends to give consumers a skewed view of cloud services. When you try to talk to them about this, you get a lot of “that wouldn’t happen” or “they wouldn’t do that” responses. Usually you have to use an analogy to get them to really think about it, and believe you me, the marketers of these products would never try to do that. They’d never tell you, say, that it’s like only having one key to your house and you have to ask permission every time you use that key (usually gets the point across right quick when I tell people that).
That’s not true. Cloud services are going down all the time.
Those of you who had Symbian phones might remember Nokia Ovi Files and Ovi Share, closed in 2010.
Megaupload was forced offline by authorities in 2012.
Nirvanix closed in 2013.
Ubuntu One closed in 2014.
Wuala closed in 2015.
Copy.com has announced that they will close in May 2016.
People are aware of this. And if the data is important, they know that trusting it all to a single cloud provider is a gamble (many will run the risk anyway out of convenience).
If you’d read my post, you would notice that I cited specific examples with that statement. Obviously services are being discontinued. That’s kind of what sparked this discussion. So tell me, have OneDrive, Google Drive, or Dropbox been discontinued?
Hi,
I agree – for the purpose of public education, the Government should force services like OneDrive, Google Drive and Dropbox offline. It’s the only way to ensure consumers don’t under-estimate the risk involved in using cloud services; because a large number of other online services going offline (and a small number remaining “online for now but who knows how long that might last”) hasn’t been a large enough warning.
Note: This post may contain traces of sarcasm.
– Brendan
A number of services that were like Dropbox have been discontinued.
Heck, even parts of Office 365 have been discontinued, although they were relatively minor (SharePoint Online Public Website comes to mind).
You are (willfully or otherwise) misinterpreting the thrust of his post. People perceive some services, like the ones he mentioned, as being reliable, regardless of the exact history of those services, and so have become accustomed to putting undue faith in remote always-on suppliers. Neither of you think this faith is justified by the facts.
And I say that people don’t put faith, because they see cloud companies discontinuing services left and right. They are just not doing anything about it because it is inconvenient.
It’s basically a repeat of the computer hard drive situation. People know that they fail and cannot be considered reliable. But backups? Uh…
M.Only,
Edited 2016-04-08 16:30 UTC
Ouch, that’s nasty. So this could affect more people than it already has.
In that case it does deserve sympathy.
Revolv sold the products promising a “lifetime subscription”:
https://web.archive.org/web/20140629125540/http://revolv.com/faq/
In this part of the world, if a company enters into a contract it has to keep it. If it’s a consumer contract, the company isn’t allowed sneak clauses with unexpected provisions into obscure places in contracts: they must be fully up front and say: “By the way, you should accept that we will brick your device whenever we feel like, and you can’t do a damn thing about it.” If a company wants to breach a contract, it has to pay compensation. All this is exactly as it should be. Cases like this are, and should be, a matter for contract law.
TL;DR: European consumer contract law already gives buyers plenty of protection in cases like this.
Edited 2016-04-08 19:03 UTC
Provided someone’s got the money, the time, and the desire to take it to court. Also provided that the company’s lawyers can’t twist “life time of the product” into something like the lifetime of the service which is part of the product. Phrases such as “good faith” in what you quoted there don’t mean the same thing to everyone, and I’d bet even in the EU a good enough lawyer could twist around it. Either that or they’ll just buy off the judge, which works too.
//The Revolv Lifetime Subscription…//
Had to laugh when I read that. It’s exactly what it says it is. It’s not a “Lifetime Subscription”. It’s a “*Revolv* Life Subscription”. In other words, the Subscription was only guaranteed for the life of Revolv. Sort of like that famous warranty that says: “Warrantied for the life of the product.” Ergo: When the product dies, so does the warranty (the engine is guaranteed for the life of the engine).
Makes me wonder what’s going to happen to all those Chromebooks when ChromeOS is dropped. “Too bad. Not only are we dropping ChromeOS, but we’re gonna brick your laptop too.” In all seriousness, this dissuades me from recommending Chromebooks to others. I’ll be telling them about this anecdote.
Edited 2016-04-09 04:11 UTC
Sometimes you buy a product that is a dud.
This guy bought a product that was a dud and paid the cost for being an early adopter.
This happens and what you are arguing for is making EOL of a product illegal which is ridiculous.
Edited 2016-04-10 08:55 UTC
No. It isn’t illegal, as long as the seller is upfront about the fact that the product will reach EOL and be bricked at some stage, and about the broad timeframe within which that will happen.
What is illegal is telling your customers that they have a lifetime service for the life of the product (which, in this part of the world, means the life of the hardware), and then sneaking a discretionary power to brick the product into the fine print.
A start-up basically pitched it as a lifetime of support. The company failed and was bought out by another.
There was an ISP in the 90s (before the dotcom bubble burst) that was offering lifetime internet for so much money (I forget the amount) … guess what when the company went the customers lost their “lifetime of support”
Sorry the guy was a moron for believing the marketing spiel.
That is because they went into administration. Insolvency does indeed let you get out of your contracts without paying compensation. However, the flipside is that your assets are used to pay off your creditors. They may not get much, but you get nothing. When Breathe (I assume that’s who you’re thinking of) went under, the fellow who owned it lost the technology, equipment, everything.
If Nest had gone down a similar route there would have been no issue at all – their “lifetime guarantee” would have come to an end, their entire business would have been wound up, and their technology and IP would have been put on the block for sale to the highest bidder. That, of course, isn’t what they’re doing. They want to have it both ways – they want to breach their contracts with one set of customers, while carrying on the rest of their business as normal. In the UK, the law – rightly – does not allow you to do that. If you as a company are foolish enough to give a “lifetime guarantee”, you’re not going to be allowed weasel out of it just because you subsequently realise that you were foolish. Going bankrupt is different, but you can’t pick and choose which obligations you’re going to keep and which you aren’t.
Lifetime guarantees have always been a bit of a joke unless it coming from a company like Rolls Royce or Bentley.
As for online services most that were bundled with my Moto X+1 are now defunct. You don’t see me bitching about it.
I am also less likely sympathize when tbh this guy wants to turn his light on ready for when he comes home, when a fucking light switch will do.
On that, we can agree.
oskeladden,
That’s what lucas maximus seems to be missing. There’s a huge difference between some online services being discontinued, and the whole product ceasing to operate as a consumer would expect even after a warranty expires.
As this starts to happen with more and more consumer devices and appliances, it’s just going to become more evident that companies need to be responsible for not bricking perfectly good “sold” hardware even past the warranty. Products should be engineered to be robust against service discontinuation, and failing that, consumers who are affected should have the legal right to demand the keys & source to their own hardware so the community can continue support.
Any company objecting to these consumer rights would have the right to explicitly deny them in their marketing & at the point of sale. At least then the consumer’s expectations of the products lifetime are inline with what the company is selling.
lucas maximus,
Just as with the Hub, some customer will assume that the marketing claims are true. Just as with the Hub, it’s the customers fault for not knowing that the company would brick the device. And then just as with the Hub, you would tell the guy who lost his family in a fire “Sorry the guy was a moron for believing the marketing spiel.” F*@k ’em, why should companies be accountable when customers are stupid enough to trust them?
* Taking your words out of context makes it a bit of a straw man, and I sure as hell hope you wouldn’t actually say this then. But consider this: logically it’s not all that different, all I did was bump up the stakes.
Edited 2016-04-12 01:05 UTC
The idea of a smoke alarm that need Internet connectivity doesn’t sound like a good idea to me.
I always thought they were quite simple things that used a small (alpha) radiation source and if it is interrupted then turn on the alarm.
Back on topic. While it is shitty, I won’t deny that. A lot of these consumer outrages a lot of the time are things that you end up chalking up to experience. If it is genuinely against consumer law where he lives than he should contact the relevant authority to enforce it rather than ranting on medium.com.
You know floppy discs used to come with lifetime guarantees because most companies know that only a very few people would bother actually claiming it. The original startup blatantly assumed the same.
Edited 2016-04-12 17:32 UTC
Actually there are several types of smoke alarms using various detection methods, but I agree with you. Anything that important should never require a source outside itself to run. This is, in fact, why even the AC-powered smoke alarms have a battery backup and make a big deal when the battery gets low even if it’s powered through AC.
My GCSE Science curriculum said they worked via a small gap between the detector and the alpha radiation source (as alpha radiation can’t travel very far).
But thinking about that now, if a room was particularly humid or there was a lot of steam (from cooking) then it would imagine I would also interrupt it.
Another case of things I believe of things being over-simplified.
I never really did much atomic science past my A-levels.
I suppose I could google all of this, by my brain is very tired after having to use reflection because a certain C# contractor didn’t expose a decent API.
Edited 2016-04-12 18:33 UTC
Indeed, it does. Hence the reason a lot of people find their smoke alarms particularly bothersome. There is another method which is marketed under the term “ionizing” which, as best I understand it (and correct me if I’m wrong) works by detecting specific particles and charge patterns. These are said to be more reliable than the wave detection method at only triggering on smoke, but do not trigger on heat which might delay detection in some cases.
My crappy apartment has the wave detecting kind, and the idiots put it right outside the bathroom door. I actually had to do a little bit of creative angling to get it out of the steam path, otherwise the damn thing went off every time I took a shower!
Edited 2016-04-12 19:24 UTC
I can’t see where Google has anything to do with this.
Google bought Nest, and all services run by Nest.
Although it isn’t clear when the decision was made or when the Revolv announcement was first posted at their website, but Google owned Nest only for a short time and sold it months before this article. It also seems, from other sources, that Google never took a hands-on management role of Nest.
So this eye-catching click-baiting statement is entirely a falsehood:
Google is intentionally bricking hardware that I own.
“A company that no one’s ever heard of, that was once owned by Google, is intentionally bricking hardware that I own,” would be more accurate.
————-
“I’m pretty sure Google has some EULA bullshit…”
The Revolv Hub sales were discontinued in 2014, when Nest/Google bought them out, so Google never sold any Revolv hubs, and certainly didn’t write the EULA.
I told you so – now Google is what was the old MicroSoft. The huge market size is actually a monopoly and Google (or Alphabet) should be regulated by authorities.