The gut reaction of too many geeks is "I can't believe you'd install a smart fridge in your home". But we need to think about this differently. Imagine if vehicles had no mandatory safety checks. How many people know anything about car safety? You'd get people barrelling down the highway with broken suspension, bald tyres or worse. We are the professionals. It's our responsibility to keep the public safe and stop shit like this happening. The software engineers who implemented this at Samsung should be struck off. Well, we could start by having something to be struck off from. I'm done with assuming individual developers will be scrupulous. We need real consequences to come from higher up. It's way past the point that this is fucking with people's lives.

It also falls apart over when more and more products become "smart" to the point where you can't really even buy one without things like this, like TVs now or cars for that matter. I'm dreading the day where I end up forced to watch an ad before starting my car.

I do think some kind of ethics training/education/licensing/organization is long overdue for software devs.

It's the smug superiority too many "tech smart" people have.

"Why would you buy HP? Everyone knows that it stands for Horrible Product."

"Serves you right for getting a TV with built in Netflix, everyone knows that it's a backdoor to botnet!"

I don't think it's apologetics for dogpoop corporate behavior, directly. But it has that effect because those of us with knowledge enjoy being smart asses or belittling those whose ignorance rewards trends we disagree with.

People should be able to go into a store and buy a thing without researching how evil it has become in the decade or two since the last time they did. Or move into a house pre-furnished. That is a failure of legislatures, not of average Joe.

Real consequences from higher up... for ads on a fridge? Corporate execs only care about money. Engineers aren't going to get themselves fired every time someone asks for a feature they don't agree with. Government? We don't need more nanny laws.

What we need is for people to think for themselves. The powers that be aren't going to save you from all the bad things. Call out the bad things to educate people, and vote with your wallet.

> You'd get people barrelling down the highway with broken suspension, bald tyres or worse.

You have this in most of the US, and people rail against any attempt to bring it in because they're frightened that garages will not give them their cars back if they think it's got something wrong with it.

I've seen people driving cars in the US that you wouldn't even be able to get a scrapyard to take in the UK, they'd tell you to just sweep it into a bag and put it in the recycling.