[thomascgalvin]

I have a pixel watch, and my main use for it is setting reminders, like "reminder 3pm put the laundry in the dryer". It's worked fine since the day I bought it.

Last week, they pushed an update that broke all of the features on the watch unless I agreed to allow Google to train their AI on my content.

[state_less]

My Android phone comes hobbled unless I give it all my data to be used for training data (or whatever). I just asked, "Ok Google, play youtube music." And it responded with, "I cannot play music, including YouTube Music, as that tool is currently disabled based on your preferences. I can help you search for information about artists or songs on YouTube, though. By the way, to unlock the full functionality of all Apps, enable Gemini Apps Activity."

I'm new to Android, so maybe I can somehow still preserve some privacy and have basic voice commands, but from what I saw, it required me to enable Gemini Apps Activity with a wall of text I had to agree to in order to get a simple command to play some music to work.

[bjelkeman-again]

That is the point when I turn around and walk away from that company.

[state_less]

I'm almost there, but the mobile operating systems (compatible with the phones i have) are a snag at the moment.

[SoftTalker]

Just stop talking to your computer and use the screen interface, that still works.

[state_less]

When I'm on my bike, it's difficult. I will ride no handed and change a track, but it's more dangerous than it needs to be.

I might switch back to my iOS device, but what I'd really like to do is replace the Andriod OS on this Motorola with a community oriented open source OS. Then I could start working on piping the mic audio to my own STT model and execute commands on the phone.

[parineum]

Just stop if you need to adjust something?

[therealpygon]

That seems a lot like corpo- excuse making about adjusting usage to compensate for the fact that a product someone purchased has been changed, and broken, in order to be forced into agreement for a contract. That is called coercion in many places, but it seems like your recommended solution is that people accept getting screwed just so corporations can make more money when people complain…is that correct?

[parineum]

I'm just saying, how often do you need to adjust your phone while you're cycling?

It's a step back to not be able to do it by voice but if you're concerned enough about your privacy, stopping once or twice during a ride doesn't sound like the end of the world.

I'm not saying it's fine that Google took away functionality but, from a practical perspective, it seems like OP was acting like there's no other option available to change tracks. There is and it's really not that inconvenient.

[venturecruelty]

I mean, any time you suggest "regulate companies" or "form a union", you get dogpiled. So until society gets its act together and collectively fixes these problems, the only immediate solution is to opt out.

[Retric]

Google already broke the basic functionality they wanted, dropping android now beats constantly looking for subpart workarounds.

Microsoft pulled the this crap with Windows, you once they stop caring about their you’ve already lost it’s time to stop paying their game.

[immibis]

So just don't bring a phone at all?

[DerCed]

How long, though, until every input is AI-interpreted and your intention is "helpfully" translated to "what you meant"

[SoftTalker]

To be fair it seems to already be happening. My phone keyboard, always prone to interpolating what I type into utter nonsense, seems to have gotten worse in the past year or so.

[mwarkentin]

If you’re on iOS, and don’t use swipe keyboard, disable that functionality. I found it made a big improvement for me.

[grayhatter]

> Just stop talking to your computer and use the screen interface, that still works.

This reply demonstrates you don't understand the problem. Please don't contribute to the enshittifacation of everything by being an apologist for unethical behavior.

[ChoGGi]

You can switch from Gemini back to Google assistant.

https://support.google.com/gemini/community-guide/309961682/...

[petre]

Siri still works fine, I guess. I almost never use it (Android user) but got exasperated with Apple CarPlay's menus and asked it to play something in my wife's car.

[robocat]

Apple CarPlay forces enabling of Siri (to enable voice control) and presumably that'll turn on Siri AI too?

[petre]

Dunno about AI, it works quite a bit like the old Siri, although she's got an iPhone 16 with a current iOS. Worked just fine when I asked it to play some artist other than the annoying YT Music playlists.

[Polizeiposaune]

We need consumer protection laws that protect against functional regressions like this -- if a widget could do X when I bought it, it should keep doing X for the life of the product and I shouldn't have to "agree" to an updated license for it to be able to keep doing X.

[bigstrat2003]

Or even updates that introduce new, undesired functionality. When I bought my PS4 (at launch), the section of the UI for video apps was pleasant and straightforward. It had the various video apps I had installed and that was it. Fast forward several years, and Sony updated the UI to prioritize showing apps that they wanted you to use (whether you had installed them or not), and even showed ads for movies and such.

I don't think it's asking too much to not make my product worse after I buy it, and I think we need legislation to prevent companies from doing that. I'm not sure what that would look like, and the government is bought and paid for by those same companies, so it's unlikely we will see that. But we do need it.

[mrcsharp]

> not make my product worse after I buy it

How can such law be written and how can a lawyer litigate that in court? The way you've phrased it is very subjective. What is an objective measure that a court can use to determine the percentage of quality drop in a product against a timeline?

[anonymouskimmer]

Easy, mandate that any UI changes be revertable for the life of the product, or until the company goes bankrupt.

[Capricorn2481]

> Easy, mandate that any UI changes be revertable for the life of the product, or until the company goes bankrupt

I'm aware people are annoyed with big UI overhauls that seemingly do nothing, but I don't think you understand what it would take to support what you wrote. You're describing something that gets exponentially harder to maintain as a product ages. It's completely prohibitive to small businesses. How many UI changes do you think are made in a year for a young product? One that is constantly getting calls from clients to add this or that? Should a company support 100 different versions of their app?

I understand a small handful of companies occasionally allow you to use old UI, but those are cases where the functionality hasn't changed much. If you were to actually mandate this, it would make a lot of UIs worse, not better.

As much as people want to act like there's a clear separation, a lot of UI controls are present or absent based on what business logic your server can do. If you are forced to support an old UI that does something the company cannot do anymore, you are forcing broken or insecure functionality. And this would be in the name of something nobody outside of Hackernews would even use. Most people are not aware there is an old.reddit.com.

[anonymouskimmer]

There are a couple of ways you can do this:

1) Have this law only apply B2C.

2) Stop having rolling feature updates except on an opt-in basis. It used to be that when I bought an operating system or a program it stayed bought, and only updated if I actively went out and bought an update. Rolling security updates are still a good idea, and if they break UI functionality then let the end customer know so that they can make the decision on whether or not to update.

For hosted software, such as Google office, is it really that much more difficult to host multiple versions of the office suite? I can see issues if people are collaborating, but if newer file formats can be used in older software with a warning that some features may not be saved or viewable, then the same can be done with a collaborative document vis-a-vis whatever version of the software is opening the document.

My wife recently went 0patch and some other programs to cover her Win10 when Microsoft stopped updating it. She still got force updated two updates having to do with patching errors in Windows' ESU feature that blocked people from signing up for the 1-year of ESUs. She let those updates happen without trying to figure out a way to block them as they have no other impact on her operating system, but it would have been nice if Microsoft have been serious about ending the updates when it said it was.

I am not a programmer, but come on. This was done in the past with far less computational ability.

[mrcsharp]

How would that work in real life though? Now every change made to any program must be tested against an ever growing combination of enabled and disabled UI changes.

[anonymouskimmer]

I don't know, but I do know that on my web browser I can add and remove various of the buttons and right-click menu options. And on linux I can skin my desktop environment in a variety of ways (Unity stopped working, I went to Gnome which was glitching, and now have something very much like Unity used to be in XFCE and unlike a commercial product I paid nothing for this.).

[account42]

Tough. Somehow IKEA is doing fine without being able to break into my house and change the way my furniture works. Devices and software should not be any different.

[staticautomatic]

As a lawyer I think this could potentially be litigated as a breach of the implied warranty of merchantability.

[mrcsharp]

Would the question still be about measuring the drop in quality to prove that the product (the software in this case) is in breach of the law?

[staticautomatic]

Well, it would probably need to be part of a physical product and not software alone unless the vendor is dumb and forgot to disclaim the warranty (see https://repository.law.uic.edu/jitpl/vol16/iss2/6/).

Second, it’s not exactly about whether the change constitutes a drop in quality but whether it renders the product unfit for its ordinary purpose. The argument would essentially be that the change is a deliberately introduced defect.

It’s a little weird but a plausible claim given the right facts.

[shigawire]

To me it seems crazy to legislate that the UI of software you have licensed cannot change.

[CamperBob2]

You don't do it that way. As the other poster suggests, you mandate that UI changes can always be rolled back by the user.

It should be illegal for you to change a product you sold me in a way that degrades functionality or impairs usability, without offering me the option of either a full refund or a software rollback.

If that causes pain and grief for server-based products, oh, well. Bummer. They'll get by somehow.

[account42]

I would go even further than a full refund - that doesn't really make the user whole who will now to have invest time into finding and learning an alternative product.

And even with the ability of rolling back somewhere hidden in the settings, forced UI changes are annoying at best - they should always come at a time chosen by the user (including "never") and not any other time.

[Eddy_Viscosity2]

Which political party do I vote for to make this happen? In the US, both parties are fully captured by corporate lobbyists. The democrats put on a better show of being more consumer friendly, but when they are in power the sit on their hands. Republicans are full force anti-consumer. Even in the EU, who just passed chat control despite it being wildly unpopular are becoming less and less responsive to what the citizens actually want.

[Teever]

International coordinated action by consumers taking a company to small claims court at the same time around the world to see redress about defective products would be an effective strategy.

[Y_Y]

Are you proposing a "World Sue A Tech Giant Day"? A global bonanza of micro-litigation that bleeds AI-leviathans dry by a thousand cuts?

I'm in, but let's have it in October or something when I'm less busy.

[ryukoposting]

I like this idea, though I'm concerned about how we could make sure the courts are ready to handle the deluge of activity.

Update: talked to some experts. IANAL, and they aren't either. This would be cataclysmic for the courts unless they knew it was coming AND every claim was filed correctly (fees paid, no errors, etc). Even if everything was done perfectly, it would be a ton of work and there's no way every case would be processed in a day. It's also likely that all the identical cases filed in a single jurisdiction would be heard together in a single trial. There's also weirdness when you consider where each claim is filed. Quote: "you may be in the right, but I can guarantee you would have a terrible time"

[immibis]

Why would that be anyone's problem? If users keep having to sue Apple to get stuff Apple was supposed to have given them, courts may impose higher and higher penalties until Apple starts just giving them to users without wasting anyone's time.

[cj]

The point isn’t to win every individual case, is it?

I assume the main point would be getting the attention of politicians who would step in and intervene. Especially if it’s a situation where the courts are truly overwhelmed.

[DrewADesign]

Yeah my pixel watch went straight into the trash. All set. Based on my conversations with folks working on these price products, it seems they simply can’t fathom why anybody is so concerned about privacy when giving it up yields so many useful products and services.

[verisimi]

> I have a pixel watch

you rented/leased a watch for an undefined amount of time.

[quantified]

Did you agree, or did you give up your data?

[throw-the-towel]

You still have automatic "updates" on? In 2025?