Want fatuous stuff that treats you with contempt? Look no further
Six right-to-repair advocates assembled on Friday morning to present Repair.org’s second annual Worst in Show Awards, a selection of the „the least private, least secure, least repairable, and least sustainable gadgets at CES.“ In a presentation streamed on YouTube, author and activist Cory Doctorow presided over the condemnation session. He said that he has been attending the Consumer Electronics Show for decades and vendors will gladly enumerate the supposed benefits of their products. „But what none of those people will ever do is tell you how it will fail,“ said Doctorow. „And that’s kind of our job here today, to talk about the hidden or maybe not so hidden and completely foreseeable failure modes of these gadgets.“ Kyle Wiens, co-founder of iFixit, gave the new Mercedes EQS EV the award for the worst product in terms of repairability. Showing a slide of the warning screen the car presents to its driver, he said, „You cannot open the hood of the car. It is locked, warning of accident, warning of injury if you open the hood. Mercedes‘ perspective is, ‚Hey, this is an electric car. There’s nothing the owner needs to do under the hood of this car.“ Wiens said this is not the first time Mercedes has gone down this road, noting that a few years ago the company removed the dipstick from its C-class vehicles, arguing that only an authorized technician should change the oil. „So this is everything that is wrong with the future,“ he said. Cindy Cohn, executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, gave the award for the worst privacy to the Sengled Smart Health Monitoring Light. „This is a light bulb that is supposed to be monitoring your health, but really is monitoring the humans in the room,“ explained Cohn. The idea, she said, is that the device can track your sleep, heart rate, body temperature, and can do so all over the house if multiple units are used. „These are one of these things where…some people are like, ‚we can do this thing now let’s find a need for it‘ and then I guess the need for it was in case grandma falls down,“ she said. „Of course, grandma has all sorts of other ways to tell you that she’s fallen down, that are really only about surveilling her and that she can control as opposed to this one, which is outside of grandma’s control.“ Cohn said the idea that you need your light bulb to monitor your heart rate is just creepy, weird, and unnecessary. And what’s more, she added, it’s not clear what happens to the data the device gathers, where it gets stored, and who has access to it.
