Cookie pops are malicious compliance to regulations that legitimately protect consumers. You’ve cherry picked one bad side effect to throw out all the ways the EU is way ahead of anyone else in protecting consumers, most of which you don’t even notice because it’s hard to notice harm that did not happen.

We use a crap ton of calls/sms/data over the same period, expect decent QoS on well performing bands, and have a TON more customer management and onboarding overheard over the same 5-10 year period. Meanwhile devices with embedded telemetry might get a plan as low as 500 MB total over 10 years and have hundreds of thousands in a single sale with no customer support overheard, SIM reactivation on new phones, etc.

Are you getting as good a deal? No, probably not, but trying to compare them to the cellular service you pay for is problematic in many ways. You too can get a $14 10 year prepaid plan from 1NCE for your Pi to send sensor telemetry from on occasion if that's what you want instead of "normal" cell service.

I wouldn't mind companies having to disclose everything and anything about the telemetry they collect though. Just putting the dollar figure on it is unlikely to shock anyone as it is low for you to do the same thing too.

Bad news: we're actually closer than you'd think to that, considering how many cellular modems on their own are full blown SOC stacks and how far we've gotten into the eSIM camp.

Like everything in tech, they can be persistently annoying in asking. You may not do it, but can you be sure nobody in the house will?

My parents got a Samsung TV. At Christmas, I turned off all the data collection features (and some abysmal AI face filter that was ruining the latest Knives Out film). It very annoyingly started prompting to reenable them regularly.

Even simpler would be not to own a TV.

Sky TV the typical UK household satellite service now comes via your ISP as IPTV rather than dish. WiFi unfortunately then becomes the requirement.

The grandparent mentioned "world wide mesh network internet". Is Amazon Sidewalk world wide? The link you posted only mentioned it launched in the United States in 2021. https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/devices/everything-you-need... shows a coverage map with large areas unserviced.

It wasn't the case until iirc a few years ago. My guess is that you're on an old version of the software that didn't yet do this.

American cable operators set up a separately managed and isolated SSID and DOCSIS service flow to provide Hotspot2.0 access for their cellular subscribers (among other things). XfinityMobile/SpectrumMobile SSIDs are everywhere now out of the box being hosted off of ISP-issued hardware.

Xfinity cable modem / router combos will create public Xfinity networks by default for many years now. Absolutely is something Xfinity could be selling access to for other corporations.

My suspicion is that Ken Paxton thought Samsung was Chinese, and soon after the court action was submitted found out they were actually South Korean (or at least 'not Chinese').

It's the routine fascist shakedown playbook at this point:

1. Make some big noise and token action about an issue that has been festering for decades, while their own party has been the primary opposition to any kind of substantive lasting reform (eg US GDPR)

2. Rally the useful idiots to rally around the cause of widely-desired reform, backfitting all the ideals behind the issue as if fascists have any appreciation for lofty ideals

3. Let the target company marinate and roast under the pressure until they capitulate and send a bribe and/or other tribute

4. Drop the token action after the attention spans of their useful idiots have expired and they've moved on to the next spectacle

5. If the issue comes to a head again, the useful idiots blame the "libuhruls" rather than having an ounce of self-awareness to realize their own leaders sandbagged and sold them out

Fairly typical in state courts, where trial-level judges are generally left to do what they please and often give little if any rationale. In federal courts, judges generally explain themselves (sometimes they are required to) en route to doing what they please.