This is actually a pretty common concern for businesses on dealing with whether and how to protect themselves when installing improvements, business-critical equipment, or other hard-to-move stuff on land or in a building without a long term lease in place.

The tenant deals with it by either building out a portable infrastructure to where they can move their business quickly if need be, or by protecting themselves legally to where the landlord can’t kick them out on a short notice, by negotiating a long term lease.

Yes, this has everything to do with AI, because this is an AI vendor locking out a customer from their ordinary workflow.

At the same time, this is a generalizable example not limited to AI, where any form of vendor lock-in on a critical business function becomes a potential point of failure when the vendor drops the customer or stops working. It’s true of a cloud provider, an email provider, an ISP, any software provider that can revoke access/authority, or even non-tech vendors like a landlord or a temp agency or an electric utility.

I think it’s worth being clear about the scope of the rating. iFixit has always been about repairability defined by parts availability, and its ratings consider software restrictions only to the point where it interferes with the user experience when replacing parts to restore things to the original performance.

Customizability (in software or otherwise) isn’t part of the score. Durability/longevity isn’t part of the score, either. Those are things that I want, too, but I can recognize those are outside the scope of what iFixit advocates for.

I do have some concerns about the partnerships creating a conflict of interest, but sometimes that feedback loop is helpful for improving the product, where the maintainer of a standard also has a consulting business in helping others meet that standard. Ideally there’s a wall between the two sides (advisors versus raters), but the mere fact that one company might do both things isn’t that big of a deal in itself.

The EFF reporting about Fog Data Science’s sources is unsure of the ultimate source of the data.

But if you’re concerned about the sources used by data brokers in general, collection and use of location data by corporations is pretty much unregulated, so it’s fair to assume that brokers use every trick they can, including buying from anyone who sells the information. Which the carriers are widely believed to do, but are kinda hush hush about it.

Using a simple flip phone with no app ecosystem would fix this, right?

Probably not.

The cell phone network will need to know where every subscribed phone is, in order to be able to route simple phone calls and text messages. In the old days, that might have meant very broad ideas of which areas were covered by which towers (often divided into 3 slices of 120° each from a single physical tower), and maybe some timing data to understand how much to offset the signal timing to make up for the speed of light.

But each generation of cell phone technology has been about adding more capacity into each wireless frequency, and the towers have specialized tricks for transmitting and receiving on the same channel at the same time with different devices, by getting more precise about transmitting or listening in very specific directions and distances, with spatial signatures that distinguish between devices. It’s all very cool and mathematically beyond my understanding, but the result is that the towers have much more precise location data about the actual handsets.

So the cell phone companies have your location data. The question becomes whether they sell them to location aggregators who resell the data on the open market, and whether some of the buyers of that data are law enforcement agencies without a warrant.