HP’s 'All-In' Printer Rental Watches Everything You Print, Tells HP All About It
HP’s 'All-In' Printer Rental Watches Everything You Print, Tells HP All About It
It supposedly doesn't monitor the contents of your pages, but it knows just about everything else.
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.”
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Good way to get banned from large corporations. I know my compliance department isn't going to trust language like that.
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.
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.
You've never worked in the IT industry, have you?
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.
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.
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