Lka1988

A proper older washing machine doesn’t have a motherboard.

If the motherboard takes a shit? A washing machine will absolutely stop functioning entirely. A couch is still a couch.

Where have you been the last 10 years? Very few devices have allowed bootloader unlocking, Samsung is no exception with their US market devices.

Yes, but a couch doesn’t stop functioning as a couch if the smart functions stop working.

At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from the classic sci-fi novel “Don’t Create the Torment Nexus”

I ride motorcycles. So I just leave it on by default because my wife worries when I go out. Rightly so. Cagers can be absolute fucking morons.

When my kids get phones, I plan to follow the same policy. If they go somewhere, they need to let us know where they’re going, who a backup contact is (i.e. if they lose their phone or it dies), and when they’ll be home. I don’t need to know exactly where they are if I trust them to inform me if plans change.

Our two eldest kids have Pinwheel phones. I was very up-front about what we can see from their devices on the parent portal side, and what they are and are not allowed to do with them. Their mom (my ex) doesn’t like it, but as I’m the one with primary custody and the one who pays for the devices, and the fact that the kids know I’m open about the phones’ capabilities, her opinion doesn’t really matter. I’m not malicious about it, either; she’s just a cunt.

But, for possessive and controlling relationships, surveillance can be harmful.

Absolutely. My previous marriage was like that. Luckily the topic of location tracking never came up.

Not hard to understand, no, but many find it to be creepy and invasive.

Those people are free to not use the tech. Being forced to use the tech, however, is absolutely a problem.

It sounds like the age-old “nothing to hide” argument.

It’s really not, though. For many couples (including my own relationship), this is something we talked about before implementing. We both decided that since we have the technology, we should use it to our advantage…so we do. Right now we’re using Life360, but I’ve already implemented Traccar (self-hosted and accessed via Home Assistant) for our older kids who have phones (Pinwheel), and I plan on extending that capability to my wife as well, so we can dump Life360.

My wife and I have each other’s locations. We trust each other. We just like having that information available. It’s really not that hard to understand.

Art of the Deal