It's not paranoia, it's just basic autonomy and privacy. No, seriously, nobody besides this household's residents need to know the temperature of food in this house. This shouldn't be a controversial stance, much like nobody besides the phone owner has any need to know the geographical coordinates of their phone. Heresy!

If your hardware device doesn't work without an app or the cloud, it's junk, full stop. Full. Fucking. Stop.

@arclight Well ... OK ... but you and I and every other cell phone user pays a tax every month to support 9-1-1 service, and part of that is that your phone must track its location and make that available to fire/police/ambulance if you call for help.

The rest of it is surveillance capitalism, yes, and some would like to eliminate the 9-1-1 connection on ideological grounds. But it's there until the law changes.

@AlgoCompSynth I guess what I mean is that my music player, turkey temperature meter, (random userspace application) doesn't need location info. I'm not going to argue against 911 getting location data in the course of first response. It's the presumption that ID, network info, telemetry, etc are a legitimate request to fully use a turkey temperature monitoring device.

90% of networking was a mistake.

@arclight It was most certainly not a mistake but a planned corporate development effort. Windows 95 / Internet Explorer was the opening salvo in a plan that turned Tim Berners-Lee's vision into the web of surveillance.

We (the general consumer, not us nerds) voted for this with our wallets and for the most part we are happy with what we got. I don't and won't have an Alexa speaker in my home or a Facebook account, but millions do.