Google previously said it would not return mailed-in devices using “unauthorized” parts.
They’re just kicking the can down the road until the heat dies down.
Keep in mind that policy changes can be reverted at any moment in time, so this is only good as long as people pay attention.
Google doesn’t care what end users scream about (such as YouTube ads) but I have a feeling some lawyers had an emergency meeting to explain why this was a crap idea.
I feel like this change is here to stay for a while.
There are evisting federal laws, right to repair laws, and plenty of attorny generals who will get involved.
So that in 15 or so years, a class action lawsuit completes where Google now provides you with a whole $10 coupon to the play store and a check for $0.65.
Reminds me of the Ashley Madison leak. Watching the Netflix documentary where there was a class action lawsuit
In August 2015, after its customer records were leaked by hackers, a $576 million class-action lawsuit was filed against the company.
In July 2017, the parent company of Ashley Madison agreed to pay $11.2 million to settle the class action lawsuit filed on behalf of the approximately 37 million users whose personal details were leaked
Lol cost of doing business, a write off by their accounting department
If I remember right on that one, users had even paid to have their data removed, too. But it was stored unencrypted. And that settlement included unidentified users which the money was going to be held onto for them to put ads in magazines or something. Wild.
The huge, nearly billion dollar Facebook settlement was something like $50/person. Google’s privacy class action suit was like $10 per person.
And boy oh boy can we be sure they learned their lesson! Facebook and Google haven’t done anything shady with private information since, right?
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Rossmann dug through the Google Store’s “Service & Repair Program Terms & Conditions” for its first-party mail-in repair service and found the same style of onerous bans on third-party parts that Samsung was recently caught using.
The Google Store’s promotional page on sustainability makes a good argument for device repair, saying, “From product design to manufacturing and across our supply chains, we are working to address our environmental and social impact at every step.”
It mentions device repair as part of that mission, saying, “When you opt to fix your phone instead of replace it, you help keep e-waste out of the landfill.”
Rossmann argues that companies don’t really want you to repair devices, since that hurts the bottom line and that they primarily want to get out ahead of right-to-repair legislation.
The first is with invasive terms like Samsung’s and (recently) Google’s, which Rossmann says are designed to render the repair program ineffective.
iFixit runs first-party parts stores for at-home repair of devices and recently ended its relationship with Samsung.
The original article contains 563 words, the summary contains 171 words. Saved 70%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
They only did this because mainstream news sources picked this up and shamed them
Vote with your wallet on avoiding pixel
It’s really sad since I want to avoid Google altogether, and the best way to do that is Graphene OS which requires a Pixel.
And, ironically, pixel phones have great replacement part availability. At least so far
