It's crazy that me jailbreaking a device voids its warranty, but companies can make these kinds of updates without any real consequence.
Customers should have the right to return a device any time if they don't like a particular update to the product. I know it's drastic, but if companies can turn what should be a basic device into an amorphous system that starts serving ads without the end-users consent after purchase, that should constitute a material change to the end product that was not appropriately advertised.
This is the exact kind of thing that consumer protection laws should be able to cover.
I comment this under any similar threads in the past and will continue to for any Australians who don’t know, but this would be a valid reason for a return/refund under Australian law. A company can’t remove or “functionally change” features after you’ve bought a product, or if they do, you’re allowed to return it for a refund.
I’ve done this in the past with a few different pieces of tech already, such as Bose speakers and a Samsung TV.
Bose changed (some of?) their home speakers to "require" you to use their app to set them up or use Spotify/etc, where you use to be able to just cast directly to them. It effectively turned smart speakers into dumb bluetooth speakers unless you did it all from inside their app. I don't want to use their app, and I didn't need to before, and while it was outside warranty the store had no problems refunding me.
I was also one of the people who bought a Samsung TV that didn't have ads, then suddenly had ads. That also got me an instant refund with no questions.
In both cases I printed out a copy of the product website where they published the changed features (eg the changelog or PR release or whatever I could find) and I also printed off a couple forums/media-articles talking about the changes. The stores didn't question it or have any issues with refunding me, I guess they just then file with the manufacturer for their own refund.
How did you get the TV to the store? I assume you didnt still have the original box lying around? Seems pretty dangerous for the TV’s panel to move it without the box.
I find it kind of comical anyone would be worrying about this. Maybe because I've moved TVs quite a few times - upright, screen side down, screen side up - from across town to thousands of miles away in the back of a uhaul. It's not a big deal
It may not be anymore, but it used to be. I bought a 65" Samsung back in 2012, and had to sign to receive it. From the truck through signature, the delivery agent held it like a giant iPad in portrait mode, pinching the long edges of the box. It had a clear "this end up" arrows... pointing sideways.
When I turned it on, there was a big dim spot on the top edge of the panel. It had to be exchanged.
Does the law seem to discourage these types of updates? Are there any know products that didn’t get an update like this just in Australia because of the law?
In both NZ and Australia all returns/refunds and most warranty claims can be done through the retailer who sold you the product. Part of doing business in these markets is being the middle man between the manufacturer and the end customer.
I had a MacBook die just outside of warranty. It was purchased in Australia. I was overseas and spoke with support who said have to pay to fix. Flew to Australia and had it replaced under consumer protection law.
Smart phones are ~annually getting major updates that change the functionality of the device. You typically can't revert back either. Some people might not like how the new method of doing something is different than the old.
However, you are not forced to apply the update. So that's a bit different.
It works for all technology, including phones, home appliances, everything. If it has a feature advertised/included on launch, and then they remove or change that feature enough that it no longer works "as advertised", you get an instant refund, even if outside the warranty.
We also get longer warranties than most other countries. Even if a brand says you only get a 1 year warranty, our consumer protection laws say a warranty has to apply for "as long as seems reasonable", so for most technology that's 2 years.
The Australian Competition & Consumer Commission has this to say:
Warranties are separate from your automatic consumer guarantees. The consumer guarantees which apply regardless of any warranties suppliers sell or give to you, apply for a reasonable time depending on the nature of the goods or services. This means consumer guarantees may continue to apply after the time period for the warranty has expired.*
You can ask for a replacement or refund if the problem with the product is major.
What is a major problem?
A product or good has a major problem when:
it has a problem that would have stopped someone from buying it if they’d known about it
it has multiple minor problems that, when taken as a whole, would have stopped someone from buying it if they’d known about them
it is significantly different from the sample or description
it is substantially unfit for its common purpose and can’t easily be fixed within a reasonable time
it doesn’t do what you asked for and can’t easily be fixed within a reasonable time; or
it is unsafe.
There is no specific time when the consumer guarantees no longer apply to products. They may apply even after the manufacturer's warranty period has past. The length of the consumer guarantee period depends on a number of factors including:
how much time has passed since the consumer bought the product
the type of product
how a consumer is likely to use the product
the length of time for which it is reasonable for the product to be used
the amount of use it could reasonably be expected to tolerate before the failure becomes noticeable.
In the United States there's the Magnuson-Moss warranty act which (among other things) places the burden on the manufacturer to prove that your miscare caused the failure; they can't simply say "you jailbroke the firmware, no warranty for you!", nor can they say "you broke that seal, no warranty!", nor can they say "you didn't install a Dodgerific oil filter in your Grand Caravan, so no, we're not going to warranty your spun main bearing" (however, nothing stops them from saying "that oil filter you installed does not have an anti-drainback valve like our oil filter does, thus your engine did not receive lubrication as quickly as it should each time it was started, so that's why your engine is damaged, and we're not going to warranty that."
From Wikipedia:
> The federal minimum standards for full warranties are waived if the warrantor can show that the problem associated with a warranted consumer product was caused by damage while in the possession of the consumer, or by unreasonable use, including a failure to provide reasonable and necessary maintenance.
The MM act also provides for awarding attorney's fees in a lawsuit against a manufacturer for violations of the act. Pretty sweet.
Separately, there are implied warranties of merchantability and fitness under the uniform commercial code.
US customers are almost completely ignorant of this. It really steams my cabbage when I see people heap praise on a company for warrantying an item that failed horribly, just outside the warranty period, and was an item that is usually quite durable and long-lasting.
Does any of this cover the scenario of a customer applying an irreversible manufacturer's update that leads to the product no longer performing every aspect of what was originally advertised? The notion of "damage while in the possession of the consumer" gets a bit murky... I'd try to argue that the consumer temporarily placed the device into the manufacturer's possession during the update process, but I'm not sure if that would hold up.
And yet it's still commonplace for electronics to come with stickers saying "Warranty void if seal broken" despite what the law actually states. Magnuson-Moss was passed in 1975. It has been 47 years and still corporations flout the law with impunity. Does it really matter what the law is if the government refuses to enforce it?
That press release in no way relates to jailbreaking, but to requirements to use branded parts...
However, yes, Magnuson-Moss also specifies that manufacturers must honor a warranty unless they can prove the failure happened due to damage or misuse caused by the customer. That (I believe) is why jailbreaking alone can't invalidate a warranty by itself.
I don't want to return my TV, I want to sue them for the theft of my functional TV and replacement with a superficially similar but vastly inferior alternative.
> I don't want to return my TV, I want to sue them for the theft of my functional TV and replacement with a superficially similar but vastly inferior alternative.
So you want to file a lawsuit for damages that would be limited to the value of your TV (possibly reduced by the value of the substitute), instead of getting a refund of the purchase price of your TV?
Other than enriching a lawyer, what benefit would that provide you?
Vendors that have a large amount of returns are often penalized by the store. Returning the product (if possible) would have a much bigger impact than you getting a $10 merchandise credit to cover the value of the “change in functionality”. You’d also have more money to buy a different TV…
But having to return something is an impact on me, and they know that statistically most of I will probably not bother.
There should be some sort of penalty for inflicting the damage after the sale besides merely nulling the sale.
Now I have to find another tv, and until I finish the return and shop and install process, I have either a defective tv or no tv, which screwed up any plans I made involving it.
Meanwhile, I did not get to mess with the money I paid for the tv after I paid it. It went into the manufacturers posession and I never got to touch it again, take some back, change the interest rate it's earning, change what stocks or equipment it was spent on...
Being able to return for refund is great, but it doesn't actually make you whole, and the damage done to your property and your use of your property was deliberate and unnecessary. (not an accident or honest failure or act of god, but a knowing choice to damage property owned by someone else.)
Getting the money back and no more is like getting punched in the face, and all you get for that is you get to make them stop punching you in the face.
And the damage may or may not be a mere trivial annoyance.
This is a contrived example, but ALL examples are contrived and yet countless real examples exist and happen all the time, so the contrived nature is irrelevant:
What if for example the tv were used as part of a recording process monitoring a long-running experiment that was either very expensive to set up, or whose results are important, not just money important but Important, and can't be replicated except by starting over which may require time no one has like years, and the banner ad obscured a critical part of the image and blew the whole process?
You can't just say "you shouldn't construct something so important with consumer parts". It's true but it doesn't get the property damager off the hook, since it's still a fact that the damage didn't happen by itself as a natural proprerty of the fact that a device was sourced from BestBuy, the damage happened because the manufacturer chose to actively cause the damage.
Maybe. I think it brings about more schadenfreude to just see their sales tank when they realize that maybe people don't want their tv owner to show pop ups on what should simply be a means of presenting content from other services.
Their sales won't tank, because this will start to get rolled out across the industry. They might take a hit for being the first mover, but once this is normalized they will ride the same gravy train as everyone else.
This is classic industrial organization economics. These companies know that they are all in tacit collusion agreements with each other. It's not hard to set up "repeated prisoner's dilemma"-type games where collusion is the dominant strategy.
Basically, as long as companies know that it's in their long-term best interest to all do the same thing, then they will all do the same thing, even if it might yield some extra profit in the short term to deviate.
The only way to stop this garbage is to make it so bad for companies to engage in this behavior that the costs outweigh the benefits. Given the above situation, where the supply of alternative goods is likely to dry up, the only other forms of recourse are punitive court damages or prohibitive policy/law from a suitably powerful government.
that's certainly possible, but I don't think it's an inevitability. For example, Samsung tried the exact same thing in the mobile space, despite holding a much more dominant position in the market than Vizio in TV's. But the rest of the competition didn't follow suit. Even amongst billion dollar coporations, a prisoner dilemma still has that allure to suddenly have one "defector" (or more) turn around and suddenly proclaim "hey we aren't doing X bad thing!". Technical details may go over consumer's heads more of the time, but ads is a near universal experience in a first world country. Marketing something as "we don't have ads" would be understood quickly.
But maybe it's just my cynicism of the modern court system that makes the suing solution sound like a waste of an individual's time and money, only to end up with nil in terms of industry impact. If that user is a very outspoken millionaire ready to fight, I welcome it. But I'm unsure if that sort of user is around these parts making comments dreaming of such opportunities.
Class action normally means you get even a smaller nothing than you would get in a direct action, but, if you win, your lawyers, despite the reduced per-plaintiff recovery, get many times more than they would in a direct action. (It also means that, for N plaintiffs, the defendant, if they lose pays an amount x where 1 << x << N times the amount they would pay with one plaintiff.)
Actually, what you probably want is a mass direct action, not endless individual lawsuits, but, first, you want a legal rule of recovery far better than you would get even for actually taking back the TV under current law.
Not in small claims court. At least not in my jurisdiction. You can seek monetary damages in (presumably) any jurisdiction but not necessarily return of property.
A class action which may cost the manufacturer 10s of millions of dollars. Yeah, you only get a small check. Yeah, the lawyers get a lot. But what other remedy does the average consumer have against this type of subtle but abusive behavior.
If I buy a Google Home from JB Hifi I am not Google's customer, I am JB Hifi's customer. If they don't want to deal with a huge load of refund claims for Google products they are free not to sell them.
If the retailer is the only available target, they're a fair target. Make it clear that these products will cost them money if they try to sell them, and they'll stop selling them.
>I want to sue them for the theft of my functional TV and replacement with a superficially similar but vastly inferior alternative.
You're free to sue them, but I suspect the lawsuit is going to get tossed almost immediately. Do you really think a multi-billion dollar company is going to expose themselves to a theft lawsuit?
Jailbreaking a device doesn’t void its warranty in many/most places; consumer protection laws override those illegal warranty lines that say otherwise. If you ever have real trouble getting something fixed on your device just reset it to a non-jailbroken stare and they won’t know the software was ever modified.
I think they provide the tools to jailbreak. With a kernel exploit to trigger it may be possible to bypass, but then it becomes a cat and mouse game, which would presumably be easier for the vendor to win (detect any program running as root, any root kits, etc, all which can be added in surprise patches). Plus, if you provide an official jailbreak, that removes some incentive for security researchers to discover new jailbreaks.
people underappreciate how much big-box stores are willing to take returns. if you bought a TV at wal-mart and years later it started showing ads, you can take it back.
smaller retailers might not have the same terms with their vendors, but for the big ones they can and will pass that through to the original vendor, and that stuff is all tracked. return rates are a big metric that vendors use to measure customer satisfaction and figure out what they can get away with.
> people underappreciate how much big-box stores are willing to take returns. if you bought a TV at wal-mart and years later it started showing ads, you can take it back.
source? walmart's return policy explicitly says the return period is 90 days.
source is working at various big-box stores, as well as returning things to them. the official return policy has little bearing on what the employees are empowered to do.
policy is the least they can do. if you're being a jerk and the want to get rid of you, they can quote policy. if they want to help, they can.
> the official return policy has little bearing on what the employees are empowered to do.
Employees may be empowered but that doesn't mean they'll help. It's a lot of trouble to take your TV off the wall, get all the accessories together, and cart it in to the store. If the employee on duty doesn't feel like helping, you're out of luck.
And naturally, if they are offended or upset at the product too (ads?! after you bought it?!), they may become your advocate... and go well beyond just being nice and helpful.
Alternatively Walmart just could threaten Vizio that they’ll stop stocking Vizio TVs if they don’t stop doing shit like this. Cheap TVs are a commodity it’s not like Walmart couldn’t easily replace them with some other supplier. And it’s not like Walmart directly benefits from these ads.
yeah, this is why it works. wal-mart has more power than you do. when you return a TV to wal-mart, they aren't taking the hit. they're turning around and requesting credit from vizio.
and then when they make their next round of stocking decisions, they're looking at vizio return rates and negotiating accordingly - either ordering less product, or requesting lower prices.
I know someone who kept “updating” their TV every year by taking advantage of Costco’s generous return policy. After the 4th time, they let him know they won’t be doing it anymore — I don’t know if that was a whole-store change or it applied specifically to him.
Costco was saying they wouldn't do it for that person any more. It's still very much their policy to take back returns for products you don't like or that broke.
You just can't abuse the policy. It may take them years to detect that abuse, but they'll stop you when they do.
Similarly, my Sony TV updated and now freezes when I try to watch Netflix (I have to unplug it from mains). I hate that I can't return it because it's not in warranty, but this isn't the TV breaking, it's Sony deliberately ruining it.
The warranty is irrelevant. If Sony (or whoever it was) sent an employee to your house to break your TV, you would sue them. The fact that they broke your TV via the internet doesn’t change that. The size of the loss would probably be the price of a new TV, so you would qualify for small–claims court rather than the normal civil court.
Well, seems Sony TVs have lots of issue related with Apps. Mine had tones of problems with YouTube. Didn't know that we could actually try to return it then. Was thinking of get a new one and kids cracked the screen. So we got a Samsung. In general we are happy with it but there is one thing drove me nuts: there is no dedicated button to switch video sources.
As long as it can show images and play sound correctly, those are really non-issues as I'm using Android TV boxes anyway. So disconnect the TV from internet and use a TV box instead, all issue resolved.
> Customers should have the right to return a device any time if they don't like a particular update to the product. I know it's drastic
That's not nearly drastic enough. Customers should have the right to know what potential updates to the product do in advance, to refuse any particular update to the product, and to roll it back if they don't like it, as well as making any other update to the product they want. That's how products have worked for thousands of years, it's how computer products work when they're running free software, and it's an absolute bare minimum to preserve basic liberal rights like freedom of speech and freedom of association. A future world where X Æ A-Xii Musk can have your Tesla car reprogrammed to scan what you say in the car for possible anti-Tesla sentiment is not a free world.*
The fact that even getting your money back after manufacturers vandalize your product after purchase to spy on you sounds "drastic" to many of us is an indication of how far we've fallen into a dystopian future even Stallman wasn't pessimistic enough to imagine 20 years ago.
Unfortunately, I don't know how we can get these rights in practice without requiring all software in consumer products to be open source/free software, and the software industry is currently organized in a way that is extremely hostile to that course of action. To a significant extent it wouldn't require positive action by regulators; merely refusing to enforce copyright on software would get us most of the way there. Someone would still have to figure out how to update the Vizio Flash chip and reverse-engineer the Vizio drivers, while a successfully enforced GPLv3 would require Vizio to help them, but at least without software copyright they could do it without any fear of legal repercussions. And Linux isn't under GPLv3, iOS isn't under any GPL, and enforcement of even the weaker GPLv2 against Vizio has so far been unsuccessful.
So, at least for the next couple of decades, we are sort of doomed to endure this sort of thing. Maybe a new free software movement founded today could change these things for the better starting 20 or 30 years from now.
______
* Maybe X Æ A-Xii is such a good person that he would never do such a thing, but historically speaking, structural guarantees of individual liberty have been much more effective at promoting the public welfare than ceding unlimited power to either rulers (who we hope are benevolent) or to "the will of the people", as amply demonstrated by the blood-drenched history of human dictatorships. Some rulers really are benevolent, but nobody remains in power forever. There's no guarantee X Æ A-Xii's heir will be so benevolent.
This is the precise sentiment that I've had each time I've found PlayStation wants to update itself. With each update, I found the device I purchased to be worth less. If silicon could be depressed, I'd call it Sony.
I wonder if someone can take this to small claims court over this. At best the company will take the TV back, at worst you can approach the local TV station to publicize this issue.
how will the local news station feel when they discover that the TV can show ads during the local news? Possibly overwriting the local ads?* And the local news doesn't get a cut?
* most of local news is just "native advertising" anyway, like that piece on the latest kitchen shelves or the upcoming "fleet week" or the local basketball team's star.
Odious as I think this feature is, I would hope that the local tv channels would not have a leg to stand on (same reason I can run an ad blocker — the sender doesn’t have the right to control how I watch). But they can whip up local opinion.
Jailbreaking, repairing, or even modifying a device does not void the warranty in the US. It hasn’t since the 70’s. That people still think that it does is pretty sad.
I’m usually against any legislation for government interfering in a free marketplace but this I can get behind. It won’t be a loss for the vendor since they get their TV back, just teaches them a lesson to not fuck with my stuff.
One question though, “liking” something is subjective and ripe for abuse. Use the TV for 5 years and then return it back because consumer wants to take unfair advantage of the law.
I’m curious, why are you usually against government interference given that you’ve apparently managed to identify at least one instance in which it is a benefit to the consumer?
My own view on regulation of markets is that it is just an incorporation of externalities into the market (better reflecting the actual “costs”)
Because it usually leads to terrible implementation. Lawmakers have very little clue about technology, have you see our Congressmen (assuming you're American)?
No one thinks about externalities or loopholes. The entire house-of-cards is built for better polling and public approval, not about actually improving anything.
Ultimately public loses, politicians gain polling points, and corporations exploit loopholes that are designed into the system.
But HN usually never fails to have a kneejerk reaction to any discomfort with "let's legislate it".
Worth noting that a lot of HN lives in Europe which seems to manage to legislate these things a lot better. My own view is that the US failings in this area are in large part the fault of the “small government, no regulations” crowd hamstringing legislation and giving lobbying groups a chance to influence proceedings. If government jobs were considered higher status (a cultural issue) then there likely wouldn’t be nearly as much corruption.
Not to be that person, but the free marketplace doesn't exist. All markets are legislated, and government picks winners and losers all the time, and that's not inherently bad.
I am fine with legislation that improves competition. Usually safety as well but that is misused (California cancer warnings) and ulterior motives hides behind "It's for the children".
We should question anyone that wants to implement legistation without proper debate and vigilence. Instead, we are frothing for legislation at every opportunity, but I don't see solid public debate about it. Revolving door in DC is spinning faster by the day, but no one seems to care.
Unregulated markets are very rarely ‘free’. Without government interference we ussually end up with a monopoly/oligoply who do whatever they and basically start acting like the government.
Back in the early 70s (the Vietnam War was still on) my father was working for a glass company that made TV tubes (among other products).
He told me that TV manufacturers knew how to make TV screens so thin and light you could hang them on the wall like a picture. He said they weren't bringing them to market because they were making plenty of money selling cathode-ray tubes.
The first LCD laptops rolled along into shops about 1990, but it was at least 2000 before flat-panel TVs appeared.
TV manufacturers have been in cartel-mode for at least 50 years.
Laptop screens can get away with poor range of viewing angle because they typically aim directly at the viewer. The same isn't true for TV screens. I'm not saying there wasn't a conspiracy, but there also weren't good viewing angles in those 90s laptops.
I agree that this is distasteful, however one could argue that capitalism is working in this case (it just doesn’t usually work as fast as people would like). Who’s going to buy a Visio TV anymore? Or a Samsung? Those companies are on every techie’s shitlist, and from there the word gets out (through reviews and word of mouth), that eventually normal people stop buying them.
Customers should have the right to return a device any time if they don't like a particular update to the product. I know it's drastic, but if companies can turn what should be a basic device into an amorphous system that starts serving ads without the end-users consent after purchase, that should constitute a material change to the end product that was not appropriately advertised.
This is the exact kind of thing that consumer protection laws should be able to cover.