FOBO TPMS Rant

Belisaerio

Belisaerio

Joined
May 20, 2009
Messages
32
Location
Ohio, east of Cincinnati
Bike
2025 Honda NT1100
So, I just bought and am now returning the FOBO Bike 2 TPMS. The application will not function unless you allow it to have access to your location. There is simply no need for them to know my location to tell me my tire pressure. Like so many companies today, they obviously just want to sell my information for an extra revenue stream. They won't stop until it costs them more than it makes. So if anyone from FOBO is looking, just no.

I'm under no delusion that my single action will matter, and sadly my privacy discipline has left me out of at least one class-action lawsuit, but it makes me livid when companies selling full price items think they can still make you the product.

Further, more general rant:
I also understand that I sound like a luddite, But holy crap, it's amazing how abusive companies have become since they realize that only people like me read the terms and conditions before accepting. Last time I looked at VENMO, they literally require you to waive all liability no matter how much they cost you or even if they take all your money and don't pay the recipient, or if it results in prison time. Of course you can always hold them accountable in binding arbitration. In case it's not obvious, I don't use them either.

BTW, I'm a software architect. Been in this business since the 90s. Nearly all of us will turn tech off before we let it into any more private data than is strictly necessary. Even then we carefully consider if we need this service. We haven't just seen the sausage, we made the tools they're abusing.
 
I agree, many of the terms and conditions are abusive. More often than not the user is left with no choice, or rather the choice is to agree or don't use the product. The tide has shifted a tiny bit here at least. There have a been local news reports where people have sued tech companies, for reasons that I no longer remember, despite them having had agreed to the terms and conditions of the product. The judges have ruled that, because of the complexity of some of them, it is unreasonable to expect the average person to understand the terms and conditions sufficiently to be able to give informed consent and have cast aside parts of those terms. In some of these cases the judges have ruled that giving the user the choice between full consent or not using the product at all when it was something that is so ubiquitous that not using it is almost impossible is not an acceptable choice. In a few of these cases the judges have simply stated that the terms and conditions are abusive, excessive, and so one-sided in favour of the company and have ruled in favour of the plaintiff despite the fact that they had consented to the terms and conditions. All of these were small local court cases with very little apparent impact beyond that case, and I am sure that the tech companies appealed them but I never heard what happened. I guess everything starts somewhere.
 
it still amazes me that you can simply google your name, find your full name, DOB, address (current and past), phone numbers, age, names and ages of your relatives and their personal info, see how much you paid for and how much your house is currently worth, how much property tax you paid and when, etc etc
 
That is only what is available to the general public. You would be astonished to see what authorized people can see about you. This wouldn't be so bad if it was restricted to authorized agencies like law enforcement but it isn't. Companies are selling and trading information about you beyond your wildest dreams. Anyone with a high computer skill or any competent hacker can also get it.
 
I googled myself, can't find me anywhere thankfully..... there is another British gent by the same name and he's taking up the bandwidth, lol. And I don't do any social media, so those people won't know me either.
 
Belisaerio said:
The application will not function unless you allow it to have access to your location. There is simply no need for them to know my location to tell me my tire pressure.
Click to expand...
I've come across this in a number of apps, much closer to home. FOBO like so many other companies is probably selling our data. When such apps aren't Quit there's a ton of tracking data to be sold. Most apps have three choices. Apps like FOBO and others have only My Way or Highway.

Andrew Shadow said:
many of the terms and conditions are abusive.
Click to expand...
Most of which are buried in 63 pages of legalese.

the Ferret said:
it still amazes me that you can simply google your name...
Click to expand...
That is borderline horrific but almost all that information has long been available as a matter of public record if you wanted to do the legwork. Now it's centralized and monetized making it easy for anybody to get that info. And yeah that's just what the general public has access to.

Worse to me is that many companies that have access to your personal data are so readily hacked on a seemingly daily basis. But not to worry. If your bank or Home Depot or whatever is hack you'll get a year's free credit checking!

Whiskey Tango..!

Another thing — why should checking my credit rating with any one of the Big Three Bureaus ding my credit rating? Why should I have to give up even more access rights to my bank account if I want "free" access to check my credit rating?

There's only so much (which isn't all that much) to prevent ourselves from being The Product.
 
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