To me, this is begging for a class-action lawsuit.

Yeah, sure, the terms of service probably say that they can do that. That's still in "unconscionable" territory. And courts do not like unconscionable contracts. If it's unconscionable, it's invalid (if I understand the law correctly).

Is this why everybody wants to make appliances with wireless?

You would have to show the judge how you have been harmed and the judge will want to know what the damages are.

Yes, this is why everybody wants to make vehicles and refrigerators and thermostats and ereaders with cellular and/or wireless: subscription revenue from bulk data purchasers of what their scans reveal. IIRC Amazon was an industry leader in this space by showing book authors what page you stopped reading on, and then bulk assessing that data at scale to estimate which sentence or word; of course, Google’s Android remains the most successful at-scale deployment of data collection for advertisers worldwide. See also, for recent context, the top comment (and others) of the LG Smart TV problem (30 days ago, 1012 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49592375

Funny thing, that. Go into an electronics store now and pay attention to the TV boxes and the printer boxes. The amount of crazy fine print on both of them now is absurd. The printer boxes all now have lots of fine print about the various ink protection and DRM schemes and subscription services, the TV boxes have everything ranging from binding arbitration on the box (LG) to "(brand) accounts are REQUIRED to use this TV" (Visio).

Customers are gonna get lost in the sauce and skip right past all of that and toss the packaging.

"Is this why everybody wants to make appliances with wireless?"

Which raises in my mind the obvious defense, which is that if you try to put four or five of these devices on your network they'll be too busy interfering with each other for them to actually spy on anything.

Let the wiretaps wiretap the wiretaps. Keeps 'em busy, makes 'em feel like they're doing something important.

    > What is my purpose?

    You wiretap the wiretaps wiretapping our wiretaps.

    > Oh my god.