In addition to tracking the printer’s online or offline status, page count, and ink levels, your rented printer will look at the types of documents you’re printing (e.g., PDF, JPG, Word), the types of devices that initiated the print job, “peripheral devices,” and other “metrics” related to the service, the All-In Plan’s terms read. This is on top of the personal information HP collects upon initiating the plan, like your location and your company name (if you have one). By signing up for the service, the terms say, you “grant to HP a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free right to use, copy, store, transmit, modify, create derivative works of and display [your] non-personal data for its business purposes.”
Good guy HP: Trying to save the planet by making their printers so bad no one wants to print anymore. 👍
For those who are completely clueless, this is meant as satire
Good way to get banned from large corporations. I know my compliance department isn’t going to trust language like that.
Two words: Corporate Espionage.
Anyone whose business plans overlap with HP’s even a fraction should run for the fucking kills and buy Brothers.
I imagine this is only for consumer-grade printers. HP’s business-class devices are usually purchased under a contract.
If anyone seriously believes HP will develop two copies of operating software, one with “send everything to HP” and one without, they are delusional.
It may very well be that there will be a contract saying something completely different than what is happening in those machines.
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.
That’s cause they have competition in that area, like Kyocera and KM.
You’ve never worked in the IT industry, have you?
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.
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 my state of knowledge is that this: https://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 to 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.
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.
I would assume this offer is meant for the lowly peasants like us, not other big corpos. Though most likely the printer industry is struggling, and they are gasping at straws, trying to mine data in the hope they can monetize it somehow
The mere fact that HP is demonstrating they can do this, even if they pinky swear they won’t do it for corporate or business clients means that any business worth their salt will avoid buying HP products.
TIL HP stands for Hostile to Privacy.
Hostile to People
Hostile Poopoo
Release the kraken!
Release the kraken!
Release the crappen!
I feel like corps have gotten bored with “you will own nothing and you will be happy” and moved on to “you will be owned and you will be happy.” Like, damn, people are absolute livestock in a freaky fucked-up way. You “buy” something and it sits there extracting value from you. You “rent” something and it gets to enjoy the utility you provide, for a time.
Just seems like “ownership” is totally screwed-up wrong, y’know? One can’t have anything any more, it’s all corporate property they let us pay to install into our own lives for them. grumblegrumblegrumble!
But this is the whole point; for a publicly traded company the people who buy their products are not the customers for whom they create value. Shareholders and investors are the real customers. People who buy the products are precisely just a resource to extract value from for these companies.
seems like we should get at least 3/5ths of a vote on the matter
The whole printer-as-a-service thing felt odious from the get-go, so the first thing HP should have done was to front a whole lot of good faith: Don’t spy on the customer. Don’t sell the data you get. Encrypt all data that gets passed between printer and HP and don’t look at anything except what is necessary to service the printer.
That HP couldn’t even make this step seems to imply they don’t care, or assume their customer base is just that easy to abuse, that it has to throw in lease terms, data collection and contrived inconvenience to halt service. That tells us the whole plan was created as a grift from the beginning, rather than a well-intended service that corrupted in time.
Maybe HP shareholders aren’t using enough lubricant.
That could be, or alternatively, they could be doing the classic corporate step back. "Oh you didn’t like paying for hardware with limited control AND spying on you at all times? We’re sorry, we will only rent your hardware like we planned, because we listen to you. "
The first thing to do is not connecting a printer to internet.
Forgot the 0th step - don’t buy an HP printer
HP+ printers REQUIRE internet connection. Right from the start.
I can’t foresee any way that could get abused to hell and back. No sir. Not even a little bit.
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I’m still all-in on never owning a
HPprinter again. I don’t need this in my lifeTo pay for this privilege too? HP is insane. Avoid like the plague.
That’s what I was thinking! I never paid for a printer subscription service, and I never will, but they are really telling me I get to pay them to take all my data as well? If this is marketed at businesses in any way its a privacy nightmare, which would probably mean even if they wanted to use them they couldn’t due to sharing confidential information. I also wonder how many companies won’t know this until they already use them and realize HP has data on them that now holds them liable.
Soon they’ll have an ad supported model that prints ads on empty spots on the page and as a banner at the bottom.
Oh fuck please dont give them ideas
Just wait until your cars infotainment system blasts you with ads when stopped at a red light.
Time to snif out the packets and replace them with cool things like
“BDSM_training_Gangbang_at_HPHQ_tuesday.pdf”
And the like. We could even just flood their database until they decide to block us.
This is the way.
Also can you send me a copy of that daddy
What the hell is HP’s printers unit smoking?!?!
Whatever it is i want some .
Definitely not magenta, ran outta that a long time ago.
Toner fumes.
Do “printers” have an approval rating? Because I bet it’s low.
I’ll stick to my Brother laser printer. Bought it during the pandemic and still haven’t been through an entire toner cartridge. Never had an issue printing either.
I got it for work documents that needed signed and mailed and such. And I like to print out flow charts and the like for big projects so I can reference them without having to pull them up digitally.
One of mine has been using the same toner cartridge for 8 years. It’s almost empty after nearly 3000 pages.
Unless you are a business getting printers on commercial leases, do yourself a favour and just buy a Brother laser printer and stop having issues with printers and start saving money as well.
Alternatively, if you print as rarely as I do, just go to Staples or a print shop. Cheaper and I don’t need to set aside any space for a printer.
Can confirm, my brother laser printer has lasted 14 years and the current toner cartridge was purchased 6 years ago.
I haven’t owned a printer in, like, 10 years and I know I’m not an outlier. This sort of shit isn’t necessarily going to bring me back into the fold.
So, public espionage, no one sane should accept this behavior for something they paid for.
