Last October, Neato announced that it was phasing out the cloud service its robot vacuums depended on—three years earlier than the company had originally promised. As a result, thousands of owners lost access to the features they bought their vacuums for in the first place, such as app control,
Have you ever been skeptical that “opt-out” toggles don’t work? New research from Northeastern University shows that you may not be a conspiracy theorist after all–at least not if you own a smart TV. Northeastern University researchers recently released a paper, Watching the Watchers, that revealed major
The RAMpocalypse is upon us. The AI industry’s seemingly insatiable appetite for memory and storage is cutting into consumer supply. As a result, Dell raised prices for corporate clients, Samsung hiked the cost of new Galaxy phones, and Apple scrapped it’s entry-level Mac mini model altogether. Some
PlayStation owners in the United Kingdom that purchased any of 551 StudioCanal movies or TV series received notice last week that those titles will be unceremoniously deleted from their libraries on September 1. People who thought they owned a digital copy of Terminator 2, Bridget Jones Diary, or (one of
You buy a smart speaker, a thermostat, a baby monitor. A year or two later it stops working, because the company that made it turned off a server or stopped sending updates. The hardware never failed. You are holding a working machine the manufacturer decided to retire. New York has
One of the biggest anti-ownership stories of the last couple months came from the everything, everywhere, can’t-get-away-from-it-store: Amazon. In early April, the company announced that starting today, Kindle devices made before 2013 will no longer be able to access the Kindle store to
Bambu Labs, a major 3D printer manufacturer, has moved to enshittify their printers by severely limiting device owners’ ability to use alternate software on their devices. When a developer used the company’s open source software to restore interoperability with Orca Slicer, a popular slicing software that gives users more
With the rise of streaming, it’s obvious you don’t own the shows you watch on Netflix or Hulu. You lose access to content the minute your bill is overdue. When it comes to the TV on which you watch that show, however, it sure feels like you own
I wonder how much you think about your data when you decide to buy an IoT device. If you’ve been watching Louis’ channel for long enough, you probably think about it more than the average consumer. Maybe it’s your first thought. Maybe it’s something you weigh against
We started the Consumer Rights Wiki just over a year ago to create a comprehensive resource for the collection and presentation of anti-consumer practices. A resource to empower those seeking to understand and push back against the companies that are forever looking to extract more from us, whilst giving
People who own doorbell cameras bought them, in part, to keep people out of their homes. As long as their video footage is stored on corporate servers, consumers could inadvertently be letting others in. At the heart of security is control. If you own the video generated by your camera,
As hard as it is to believe, it's already been a year since the Consumer Rights Wiki was first launched (albeit under a different name—real OGs remember the Consumer Action Taskforce Wiki!). One year on, we've hit 1000 content articles, and the Wiki continues to