Comment on HP’s 'All-In' Printer Rental Watches Everything You Print, Tells HP All About It

• conciselyverbose@sh.itjust.works ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  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.

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  • MrBusiness@lemmy.zip ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    That’s cause they have competition in that area, like Kyocera and KM.

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• Diplomjodler@feddit.de ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  You’ve never worked in the IT industry, have you?

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• GojuRyu@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  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.

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  • peak_dunning_krueger@feddit.de ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    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 state of knowledge is that this: 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 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.

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    • GojuRyu@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      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.

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