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IoT Garage Door Opener Maker Bricks Customer's Product After Bad Review (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Denis Grisak, the man behind the Internet-connected garage opener Garadget, is having a very bad week. Grisak and his Colorado-based company SoftComplex launched Garadget, a device built using Wi-Fi-based cloud connectivity from Particle, on Indiegogo earlier this year, hitting 209 percent of his launch goal in February. But this week, his response to an unhappy customer has gotten Garadget a totally different sort of attention. On April 1, a customer who purchased Garadget on Amazon using the name R. Martin reported problems with the iPhone application that controls Garadget. He left an angry comment on the Garadget community board: "Just installed and attempting to register a door when the app started doing this. Have uninstalled and reinstalled iPhone app, powered phone off/on - wondering what kind of piece of shit I just purchased here..." Shortly afterward, not having gotten a response, Martin left a 1-star review of Garadget on Amazon: "Junk - DO NOT WASTE YOUR MONEY - iPhone app is a piece of junk, crashes constantly, start-up company that obviously has not performed proper quality assurance tests on their products." Grisak then responded by bricking Martin's product remotely, posting on the support forum: "Martin, The abusive language here and in your negative Amazon review, submitted minutes after experiencing a technical difficulty, only demonstrates your poor impulse control. I'm happy to provide the technical support to the customers on my Saturday night but I'm not going to tolerate any tantrums. At this time your only option is return Garadget to Amazon for refund. Your unit ID 2f0036... will be denied server connection."
. . . . . . reminding us that those buying IoT devices don't own anything useful, and that your f**cking GARAGE DOOR OPENER could be dependent not only on Internet connectivity but the continued willingness of a service provider (Garage Door Operation As a Service--GDOAAS?) to provide service, at whatever cost they deem fit. I'll leave my light bulbs, refrigerator, door locks, garage door opener, and thermostat off the Internet, thank you very much.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Sometimes the customer is wrong
Sometimes a company should hire a blond Customer Service Lady that is unfailingly polite.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
In a click through EULA he probably agreed to lots of things.
He agreed that the manufacturer can sneak in the middle of the night and harvest his, and his family's organs, of their ISP hasn't already gotten them first.
That EULA probably also said that they have no liability if they knowingly and deliberately remotely open his garage door when they specifically know he is not home.
Oh, the joy of EULAs.
. . . and Ballmer took Linus onto a high mountain and showeth him all the CPUs of the world and said "these can all be yours if you simply bow down and click I AGREE to my EULA."
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
Basically, you get a txt msg from your wife saying that her clicker broke, please remotely open the garage door. So you open it. Then later you find out your wife's phone was stole by a thief, along with the contents of your garage and house, and that you never had a wife in the first place.
Won't buy anything that relies on an app for full functionality. These fly by night startups have a good chance of either going out of business or abandoning old models within a year or two. Stuff for my house needs to last 10 years bare minimum, ideally with zero fiddling, re-configuring, firmware upgrading, or other jack-assery.
Light switches fit that bill just great, so far apps don't have anything remotely close to that functionality to maintenance ratio.
The spelling is adequate for its intended porpoise.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
IoT should be about open protocols and services. Devices that can only connect to their proprietary servers should be called "AOL of things" instead.
Surely smart IoT device makers wouldn't eventually discontinue the service, like, oh, say, Plays For Sure did. Or Zune.
But then there are multiple security issues too. Including a hacker getting code into a device in your home, thus getting a beach head, no mater how well your firewall is configured.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
Internet of Tantrums.
My girlfriend had this opinion when running a coffee stand in a shopping centre. If a customer complained there would be one chance to remake the coffee. If they complained again they got there few dollars back along with a "We can't make a coffee to suit you. Go find someone who can and don't come back. We won't do any better tomorrow and we have other customers to serve".
Difference is, a good quality high volume low cost product that people line up for and sells in the thousands per day allows you to tell a few customers to go screw themselves. An expensive low-volume emerging product still heavily reliant on word of mouth does not.
Who cares? It was a dick move regardless of what the EULA says.
a blond Customer Service Lady or these guys ...
This device is not a garage door opener. It's an add-on for one, which connects it to the internet so you can check on the status of your door from a phone app (in case you're worried you forgot to close it).
The company disabled the cloud access to this guy's device, rendering it completely useless for the only thing it's good for. The customer couldn't get remote access working anyway, but that's the only thing that device is for! So instead of fixing his issue, they locked him out of using his own device (maybe some friend could have gotten it working for him), all because he posted a bad review. If you can't see why this is wrong on many levels, I can't help you.
If you're going to sell to the public you'd better thicken your skin a bit. Fighting a tantrum with your own tantrum is childish, and will cost this guy some business.
Bullshit. The device was bricked. The device is utterly unusable without the cloud account that it's linked to, so that's no different than "bricking".
No, making something that someone paid for unusable, after the sale, is NOT justified, ever, for anything. If you want to decline to provide further support because of abusive language, that's fine, even if that means they can't figure out how to get it working on their own, but that's very different from bricking it, which is utterly spiteful.