Freitag
Jun272003
Who owns your Mobile Phone ?
27.Jun.2003 | 18:44
Cory Doctorow has a crazy story on BoingBoing about T-Mobile removing software from his Sidekick without asking:
T-Mobile has announced that they are "no longer supporting" the video games they bundled with the color Sidekick. Normally, this would be pretty straightforward -- you could use 'em unsupported, you could find someone else to support 'em, whatever.
But because the Sidekick is a phone first and a computing device second (not a technology decision, but rather a marketing/operations one), "no longer supported" has a much more sinister meaning: when T-Mobile withdraws its "support" of the games on the color Sidekick, it will remotely erase the games from the color Sidekicks of all of their customers. (...)
Who owns your Sidekick? T-Mobile does, apparently, even if you spent full retail on it (I dropped $250 on mine). You need T-Mobile's permission to install software on their device. T-Mobile will, from time to time, decide to erase software from your device. And when you stop subscribing to their service, T-Mobile will delete all your data forever, without giving you any mechanism for moving it off the device (and without giving you the ability to design a tool that would let you do this). (...)
Reader Comments (1)
As if we really needed another reason to hate German Telekom.