In addition to tracking the printer’s online or offline status, page count, and ink levels, your rented printer will look at the types of documents you’re printing (e.g., PDF, JPG, Word), the types of devices that initiated the print job, “peripheral devices,” and other “metrics” related to the service, the All-In Plan’s terms read. This is on top of the personal information HP collects upon initiating the plan, like your location and your company name (if you have one). By signing up for the service, the terms say, you “grant to HP a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free right to use, copy, store, transmit, modify, create derivative works of and display [your] non-personal data for its business purposes.”
So, public espionage, no one sane should accept this behavior for something they paid for.
I haven’t owned a printer in, like, 10 years and I know I’m not an outlier. This sort of shit isn’t necessarily going to bring me back into the fold.
You’d have to be a complete mental deficient to go out and consciously decide to buy a brand new HP product in 2024. Every single day it’s more bad publicity for HP and yet they don’t receive any consumer backlash that lasts longer than the breath required to complain about it.
Ain’t nobody printing much anymore, just shit companies finding ways to squeeze what customers are left. I got a b&w brother printer years ago and it’s been doin just fine without all the extra “features”. If brother went the way hp is going I wouldn’t have a printer at home anymore.
My 4 year old brother all in one was one of the best home purchases I’ve made.
Damn HP! My three year old laptop that I mostly de-crappified was just updated with a pop up selling HP extended warranty. They made it look like a system dialog, there was no “quit”, and “send personal data to HP” was selected by default.
I had to explicitly select to not sending data, explicitly select to make the choice permanent instead of bugging me later, before clicking ok
Never again HP, never again. It’s so sad to see a formerly great engineering company stooping this low as just another sleazy huckster
Good way to get banned from large corporations. I know my compliance department isn’t going to trust language like that.
The mere fact that HP is demonstrating they can do this, even if they pinky swear they won’t do it for corporate or business clients means that any business worth their salt will avoid buying HP products.
Two words: Corporate Espionage.
Anyone whose business plans overlap with HP’s even a fraction should run for the fucking kills and buy Brothers.
I imagine this is only for consumer-grade printers. HP’s business-class devices are usually purchased under a contract.
If anyone seriously believes HP will develop two copies of operating software, one with “send everything to HP” and one without, they are delusional.
It may very well be that there will be a contract saying something completely different than what is happening in those machines.
I can’t tell if this is bait with an aptly named account or a genuine mistake. In case it’s the latter: they wouldn’t necessarily have to develop two copies of the software. There are multiple ways of making the same software work for both without spying on the corporate customers. One of the simplest is called a feature flag and is in essence just a value that tells the software if it should use a particular feature or not. Whether or not they spy on corporate users is not a question of the technology, but rather their integrity and fear of getting caught.
Oh sure. They could do this. But they don’t.
But there is absolutely no way to verify what they are doing, no fear of getting caught and thus there is no incentive to behave with integrity.
At least my state of knowledge is that this: https://reproducible-builds.org/ isn’t fully functional and even if it were what HP does on their machines is closed source stuff.
And even if there were companies or organizations that are big enough to enforce transparency, like a big multinational or a government, there will be plenty of cases where smaller companies with sensitive data can’t, like doctors offices or independent lawyers.
It is way easier to charge for a “data privacy” subscription tier and then still just not honoring the wording of that, than to actually put in the effort.
Sure, I’m not arguing whether they are respecting the agreement, just whether the software would be much of a factor if any in that decision.
You’ve never worked in the IT industry, have you?
They absolutely already have multiple types of software, one to exploit consumers and one for enterprise customers.
Using different software for enterprise customers isn’t even unusual.
That’s cause they have competition in that area, like Kyocera and KM.
I would assume this offer is meant for the lowly peasants like us, not other big corpos. Though most likely the printer industry is struggling, and they are gasping at straws, trying to mine data in the hope they can monetize it somehow
Shocked.jpg
I’m still all-in on never owning a
HPprinter again. I don’t need this in my lifeWhat in the dystopian fuck?
HP, proud frontrunner in late stage capitalism
Ok boys, 10,000 copies of goatse. Grayscale to save money.
“You are out of magenta”
“I have a black and white printer.”
Fuck you, out of magenta.
TIL HP stands for Hostile to Privacy.
Hostile to People
Hostile Poopoo
Release the kraken!
Release the kraken!
Release the crappen!
What the hell is HP’s printers unit is smoking?!?!
Toner fumes.
Whatever it is i want some .
Definitely not magenta, ran outta that a long time ago.
Do “printers” have an approval rating? Because I bet it’s low.
I’ll stick to my Brother laser printer. Bought it during the pandemic and still haven’t been through an entire toner cartridge. Never had an issue printing either.
I got it for work documents that needed signed and mailed and such. And I like to print out flow charts and the like for big projects so I can reference them without having to pull them up digitally.
One of mine has been using the same toner cartridge for 8 years. It’s almost empty after nearly 3000 pages.
I can’t foresee any way that could get abused to hell and back. No sir. Not even a little bit.
Can someone tell me why this is even necessary? Network printing has existed for almost as long as printers have and doesn’t require the cloud. There are standard protocols for discovering printers on the network and sending prints to them. I’m on Linux, have never installed printer drivers or even manually set up a printer, and I can print just fine over the network, it just knows which device is a printer and I can send prints to it with a single click. Are people so afraid of the system print dialog that they insist on using HP’s app or something?
I’ve yet to meet one person who I think is dumb enough to subscribe to this.
