Please cross-post to a privacy community. Ultimately, this sounds like it’s going to produce a situation where a dumbphone that allows for hotspots and them a smartphone without UPI or a SIM and with a VPN are a workable solution.

I expect this was in the terms of service, though

While I expect the same, there’s also just a reasonablility standard. If Meta and Google updated their TOS to say that users agreed to become human chattle slaves to mine cobalt and forfeit their rights, no court (…right, SCOTUS?..right?) would uphold that. A TOS is a contract, but it’s mostly for the protection of companies from liability. Takign active steps to brick someone’s device over the device not connecting to it’s C2 server (the company had zero evidence this was done intentionally and a router firewall misconfiguration could just have easily done the same thing), is IMO something that should result in a lawsuit.

The fact that this isn’t considered outright fraud is disturbing. This person OWNS the device, yes? They’re not leasing it.

FFS, this should be illegal.

Oh no.

…Anyway