The modern printer designed for the home is a fascinating little beast, as Charles Tisseyre would say on the show Discovery. Connected to the internet, it can suddenly stop working because its ink cartridges have been remotely deactivated, rendering them unusable… even if they are brand new.
Until recently, I didn’t know that this sleight of hand, courtesy of HP, was possible. I printed a page or two a week, without knowing what was up my nose. One day, a sheet came out of the printer to give me an announcement that seemed surreal to me. It was written that I could no longer print due to the absence of a credit card number in my file.
Pardon ?
A call to HP confirmed that I had read correctly. The lady on the line suggested that I put my two full cartridges in recycling and get some more.
To understand the matter, you should know that HP offers a subscription system to its customers called Instant Ink. With the device connected, we monitor your ink consumption remotely and automatically send you cartridges according to your needs. With this technology, we promise you’ll never run out of ink in the middle of the most important print of your life.
Instant Ink offers various packages, more or less expensive, depending on the estimated print volume. The subscription being free for the first six months, I chose to take advantage of it. In any case, nothing is really free, the price of the service is included in the sale price of the device. During these six months, I only received one shipment of cartridges given my sporadic use of the printer. The black ink was used for a number of pages that I can count on the fingers of one hand. The one containing colored inks was not used.
But I will have to get rid of it, I was confirmed, because the six-month trial has expired. Therefore, the cartridges obtained during the subscription period have been deactivated.
To hell with the environment! To hell with common sense! As soon as you leave its program, HP punishes you. Seems like a questionable method to convince customers to pay a monthly subscription, which I ended up doing just to avoid throwing away full cartridges.
The company did not respond to my questions. But she told French media 01net that her system is logical since customers receive invoices by the page and not by the cartridge. How is it detrimental for HP to let its customers finish cartridges they have already installed?
I contacted the people at Équiterre to find out if they were aware of this practice which causes unnecessary waste and overconsumption. It was the first time they had heard of a case of remote deactivation of a perfectly functional object.
“This illustrates the risks associated with the hyperconnectivity of our devices. Manufacturers have control that can be exercised improperly, as in this case. Preventing the use of a device that is in a house is revolting,” reacted Amélie Côté, source reduction analyst.
The same kind of environmentally damaging tactic is used by Tesla, which is even more paradoxical given the nature of its one and only product, the electric car.
Elon Musk’s company sells models S and X at a lower cost whose batteries are less efficient. Acceleration is slower and, importantly, range is around 130 km less than more expensive models. The problem, and it is shameful, is that the batteries are identical! Tesla chooses to lock their capacity with software, so that they can only be used at 80%.
The publication Electrek, which suspected that Tesla was using this maneuver, wrote in August that Tesla had confirmed to it that this was indeed the case.
By intentionally making 20% of the batteries in certain models unusable, Tesla is ignoring all the nickel, cobalt and other materials that are as expensive as they are polluting that they contain. In 2023, in the midst of the climate crisis, we expect better. All of these components could be used to create more batteries.
At least in this case the customer won’t have any unpleasant surprises along the way, like with HP. He knows what awaits him. But the example shows to what extent a company is capable, with technology, of “playing” remotely with objects that belong to us and are in our hands.
Today, these connected devices are everywhere. Headphones, refrigerator, thermostats, coffee machine, planter, watch, doorbell. Voice assistants like the Google Nest and Amazon’s Echo Dot have raised privacy concerns since their invention, but clearly there are other reasons to be wary of things without a microphone.
It seems like fiction, but no.