The article should have buried sony for how egregious they are. They require the app to collect location information, and ear. https://www.sony.com/electronics/support/articles/00233341 I'm not sure what else they collect.. but those are the 2 bad ones.
They've got a few settings that are software controlled (one being the bluetooth's internal volume) What happens if you get a software update and you open the app on a plane without wifi? You can't use it because it requires the internet to get the latest _required tos_ to use your headphones. You can't proceed further without being forced into an agreement. Clicking "don't accept" pushes you back to the tos screen.
I recently tried out wireless noise-cancelling headphones from both Bose and Sony, and (the important privacy issues aside) the user experience with these apps is just horrible.
You unpack your Bose headphone, eager to use them. But before that, you have to download an app on the iPhone, then download a software update program on your laptop, which in turn opens a program in the browser that downloads an update, then you connect the headphones with a wire to the laptop that the update gets installed, and THEN you can start using them.
I didn’t find that an issue at all, and not sure what you mean about the laptop part I only use the mobile app to upgrade my qc 35s.
I do find the Bose UX to be horrible though for another reason, which is the incredibly stupid “feature” that the headphones can be connected to multiple devices at once. Since I use it both with my phone and laptop and they’re often in range of each other, sometimes the audio control will just switch back to the other device than the one I’m trying to use, I assume because of some background process that’s still open, and I lose my sound. If one device is on the edge of connectivity range, it’ll beep every couple of minutes as it connects and disconnects even though I’m not even using it. Then if I ever want to connect a third device like a tablet, it’s made to switch back and forth between exactly 2 devices not 3 so things get even more messed up.
It’s quite annoying, and I feel like I’m the only one bothered by these issues because I don’t see a lot of other people complaining. But I’ll definitely be switching to a different brand away from Bose when these headphones wear out. Probably the upcoming over ear Apple headphones, since I find airpods to not have any of these issues and generally work great at switching between two devices without being stolen back by the previous device.
I love this feature, but Mac is the bully in this situation. It captures the connection often even when nothing is playing and when Mac is asleep it still tries to connect and probably due to low power mode takes FOREVER for the phone to sync and realize what I actually want is to play audio from my phone not laptop...
Yeah maybe this is another case of walled garden apple stuff where it only works well if you're 100% in their ecosystem. They seem to have very chatty bluetooth headphone code in general, like the airpods are effectively always in pair mode you don't have to hold a button down or anything to get them to start pairing to another device. But the end result is it does work with fewer headaches than my Bose QC35 and is still just as easy to switch between devices. And apparently there are further improvements with that coming in iOS14 too.
I've had these PLT headphones swap from phone to laptop when phone is playing music and laptop makes some noise (email notification, etc.) Whilst it's handy for the rare circumstances I want to start listening on the laptop without stopping the phone, it's a massive pain in the arse the other 99% of the time. Not least because it doesn't automatically switch back and start playing again.
I suspect it's the generic Bluetooth chipsets, mind, rather than anyone in particular because this happens with the PLT headphones and the Taotronics dongle I've got.
Your comment is funny to me because I have a pair of WH-1000XM3 and the one feature I'm missing the most is Bluetooth multi-point pairing. It's super easy to switch devices with the Bose (even though yeah, it can be finicky) meaning you don't have to re-pair your devices every time you want to listen to music on your phone, use them for a Slack call or for a TV show.
I used to love my Bose QC 35 ii's but now I'm convinced they're kind of a scam.
Bose deliberately made the battery enclosure very difficult to open so that you can't replace the battery yourself. Why do you need to replace the battery? Because if you use them every day, the battery degrades so that a full charge only lasts about 1 hour, down from 20+ hours, within just 2 years.
So you aren't really paying $250 for a pair of headphones, you're paying $125 a year to rent them, as they will only last 2 years due to planned obsolescence. This seems to have been a deliberate decision by Bose as the previous model had a removable battery.
> Bose deliberately made the battery enclosure very difficult to open so that you can't replace the battery yourself. Why do you need to replace the battery? Because if you use them every day, the battery degrades so that a full charge only lasts about 1 hour, down from 20+ hours, within just 2 years.
I've used my QC35 II's 6 to 8 hours a day for 5 days a week for 4 years. They last approximately a full week on one charge; they'd die mid Friday if I used them a lot that week or early Monday if I forgot to charge over the weekend. I've had them unplugged and unused since March (work from home) and they still had 60% when I tried them just now.
Okay, that's interesting. I've used mine ~6 hours per day for 5 days a week for 2 years. Why can't mine hold a charge for more than an hour? Maybe there's something I don't understand about how batteries work that I am doing and that I could do differently.
I mostly don't use bluetooth. I keep them wired 95% of the time and noise cancelling just eliminates office noise. The remaining 5% of the time is typically on a flight to somewhere connected to my iPhone a couple of feet away.
I wish I could justify wired headphones but I'm too much of a dolt, I've chopped the cord too many times and broken more laptops than I would like to admit.
Could yours be stored or used in extreme heat frequently?
Beyond that, it could just be a battery defect. Devices that last for multiple days should last for several years before seeing that kind of degradation.
You can’t change the noise canceling settings without the phone app. They also default back to “full” after you power cycle the headset. I wanted to use them with a PC and no ANC but no luck without the clunky phone process.
Even worse, on my QC35 II's, the hardware button defaulted to Google Assistant on Android, and I had to use the app anyway to set it to modify ANC on press.
I have the original QC 35's and they never originally gave us the option to change the ANC. Only through an update and using the app that they switched it on.
If our headphones didn't use can app, we would still be stuck without being able to modify the ANC level.
So far Shure hasn’t done anything that dumb, but you have (or rather, had. They seem to have to be coming out with over the ear model) to be ok with tethered headphones.
I kind of like the tether. Harder to lose them under a bookcase. And less of a problem if they plop out during exercise.
I have the Bose Quiet Comfort 35 II. I use them with a MacBook Pro through Bluetooth pairing. I never installed any app and never connected the headphones physically to anything.
What is the OP talking about? And why would anyone install an app to use headphones?
>>Why would someone buy noise cancelling headphones if they don’t need that feature?
You don't ALWAYS need/want that feature.
Some reasons:
* Safe battery life
* Hear conversation or important sounds in the background
Most headphones (all I've purchased) have a dedicated hardware button. In fact, all of them have 3 modes: Noise cancelling ON, noise cancelling off (Switch), noise cancelling off + enhanced microphone (quick transient button, to quickly hear e.g. captain announcement etc). Can't imagine having to do that through software, it'd defeat the convenience.
That being said, fully agree; my Sennheiser HD380 with 3.5mm jack have lasted a decade and I don't know when or if I'll ever need to replace them. They sound and feel as good as new.
The expensive Bluetooth headphones and headsets are a disposable commodity with inferior user experience for at least some use cases (Pairing? Latency? Battery? Software? You don't have to worry about those with 3.5mm:). Yet, there's a positive ARMY of people who always join in to defend the removal of 3.5mm jack - even though they gained nothing from it, and some of us lost a lot :-/
huh, my Sennheiser headphones can control the noise cancelling with buttons on the headphones. Some limitations were annoying (2 connected devices at once, it gets very confused by my dual boot machine) but sounds like I dodged a bullet with brands requiring custom apps
They may want to disable that feature occasionally.
I sometimes wear glasses which prevent the headphones from forming a perfect seal. If I walk around with the headphones on, I get a "wow" going on which is quite tiring. Turn the NC off and they're ok. I only rarely do this, so I wouldn't have bought a dedicated pair only for this purpose.
Exactly. If you are disabling noise cancellation on the QC II, you bought the wrong headphones. There are much nicer ones without noise cancellation for less money.
I just ran into this very issue. I opted out of downloading anything. It was working fine until just now for whatever reason the volume is so low that I can hear a background hiss. The source laptop volume is maxed out.
If this is Sony's way of forcing me to use their app, they guessed wrong. I just bought these and am considering returning it.
Did you try raising the volume directly on the headphones?
If it's a WH-XM1000, you can do that by sliding the finger up on the right earphone.
For some reason mine's volume works as expected on an iphone (phone and headphone control the same volume) but on a pc (windows / mac / linux) the controls work separately...
long time user of the sony wh-1000xm2. never have had any such issue. i have noticed that it seems like the headset and phone have independent volume controls but both phone and headset have physical controls, no app required.
The Jabra 85h is great in this regard. Totally fine without the app, the app itself has a ton of features and useful items including changes to side tone and auto noise cancellation. The app pulled in a firmware update when I first connected and ran that in a few minutes without me touching anything. I would like to compare my set to the top Bose and Sony sets but at almost double the price of the 85h, I can't bring myself to spend the money.
I have the Sony WH-1000XM3 noise cancelling headphones, didn't have to install an app at all and the noise cancelation on them is absolutely incredible. Along with the amazing sound quality, they're the best headphones I've ever owned.
Hmm, I've tried the Sony (WH-1000XM3) and Bose (QC35) headphones at an electronics store and could pair both rather seamlessly with my Android device. NFC helped to make this even easier than pairing AirPods.
They have a feature that’s quite handy to me (the proprietary quick changing from one Apple device to another IFF it has the same Apple ID — so no good for shared hardware like a tv) but “quite handy” is far from invaluable.
You can program a tap on each earbud to do certain things: again, handy but you don’t have that ability I doubt you’d be upset.
Apple’s quite clever on figuring out how much “bleed out” from their own stack works for them (e.g. iPod support for PCs, which open standards to embrace, which not, etc). They are hoping you’ll switch to an iphone next, but even you don’t you are revenue.
If you're not used to it you'd probably not be upset but having an iPhone and Airpods I'd be upset going back.
I switch between my Mac and my iPhone daily so if I had to re-pair to do that that would suck. My guess is many modern alternatives let you pair more than one device at a time which would be another possible solution (better or worse I don't know). Apple's switching sometimes fails for me and when it does it's infuriating since it can end up taking several minutes to fix when all I wanted to do is use the damn headphones.
The tapping is pretty useful too though the features I use (pause/play/skip to next song/backup) are also part of the bluetooth headphone standard so while I can't change them to something else my other bluetooth headphones have the same standard features that I actually use.
This is also one reason I didn't like the Airpod Pro's. Tap is replaced with squeeze. Squeeze requires 2 fingers, Tap works with a knuckle. I can tap with full hands. I can't squeeze it full hands so they effectively downgraded the product with pro.
Bluetooth is supposed to require that but not all implementations do.
Apple has some additional out of band signalling so that if it is paired on one device you don’t have to do any handshaking to switch it to a device it’s never seen before as long as that device uses the same Apple ID.
It’s nice, it reduces friction but as you say it’s a small. Ice to have at best.
I've owned the Sony WH-1000XM2 for several years and while the Android app location collection is unnecessary, ear data is entirely optional.
You have a valid point that the app can misbehave regarding updates and lack of internet connection. I personally find myself never using the app, it only really provides 3 somewhat useful features; equalisation (which forces the audio codec to SBC which is inferior to LDAC so I've never used it); automatic profile switching, e.g. ambient sound if detecting you are walking and finally, the level of noise cancellation to apply.
This model has a dedicated switch on the headphones to change the profile where a long press even "calibrates" the sound based on atmospheric pressure, not sure I buy into that gimmick, but they're perfectly useable without the app. I have them paired with Android, Windows, macOS and Linux and all work perfectly (with the minor exception being Linux does not support Bluetooth absolute volume). The headphones also support volume control from the unit for devices which have an older Bluetooth stack which does not support absolute volume.
Overall, I agree the app needs improvement but I'm not sure there's anything that warrants burying the company of these decisions. I suspect for many users, the app is entirely useless and not worth installing.
I immediately deleted Sony’s app after disabling EQ and probably some other gimmicks on my XM3s—has worked alright with Apple devices.
(Well, as ‘alright’ as could be expected. Switching between devices requires slow re-pairing through long power button press, but I don’t think Sony’s app would’ve resolved that.)
This is one area Bose are notably better in, i.e. connected to two devices simultaneously. I find the XM2 can remember pairing for at least 2 devices, typically my phone and laptop but I have to manually disconnect from one device and connect using the other when switching. This is quicker than entering pairing mode but still an upto 30 second process, but much of that time is due to the awkward Bluetooth settings menu in recent versions of gnome.
Geez, that's brutal. I'm glad I'm seeing this....it never crossed my mind that this sort of thing would be something that might get built into headphones.
If I want to avoid this sort of thing, I'm thinking / hoping it's sufficient to simply avoid headphones that require an app.
"I'm thinking / hoping it's sufficient to simply avoid headphones that require an app."
Every effing time they convince users to install an app they magically have a tool to steal peoples personal data.
Not just headphones: the kids toy drone can be controlled using an app from the cellphone? The security camera just purchased doesn't use standard protocols over a web browser but needs its own app? The IoT system doesn't use standard protocols as well but forces the use of their app? Bad, bad and bad! And so on for every piece of hardware that needs a proprietary app that -betting all my horses on that- will ask for full permissions to access everything.
In this context, headphones are among the easily replaceable accessories with secure and better sounding ones. Just get wired ones and avoid architectures that force the use of wireless phones just to make a bigger business out of a misfeature.
You could get a 'dumb' bluetooth adaptor for your wired-but-cable-changable headphones. e.g. https://thebtunes.com/
Or you could just get some basic noise-isolating bluetooth headphones. It sounds like most/all of these headphones that spy on people are ones with active noise cancelling.
> If I want to avoid this sort of thing, I'm thinking / hoping it's sufficient to simply avoid headphones that require an app.
Or just get one with a good old 3.5mm jack.
Beyer Dynamic, AKG and Shure have several options much cheaper than these Bose or Sony headsets which still give you at least 10x the audio-performance.
For headsets, if you care about usability, portability, longevity and performance, wired is still the no-brainer choice.
> Beyer Dynamic, AKG and Shure have several options much cheaper than these Bose or Sony headsets which still give you at least 10x the audio-performance.
It's complicated.
The lowest level opinion is "Bose and Beats are awesome, soooo much bass!!!" That's the typical consumer.
The level above that is what you said. That's sometimes called mid-fi. At least these things don't have major flaws anymore.
The next level is companies and products specifically focused on high performance - Stax, Audeze, Sennheiser, Etymotic, etc and their best models. That's the "audiophile" level (and here truth is mixed with a lot of bullshit also - stay away from head-fi.org, it's a cesspool of pseudoscience).
And the level above that is when you realize imperfections in headphones can be corrected via DSPs, for the most part.
I have the Sony noise cancelling flagship model. By default, it's deeply flawed. It's tuned to the taste of the average consumer at Walmart ("moar basssss!!!"). But apply the oratory1990 corrections (from Reddit) and they sound like some nearly-flawless high end devices. The corrections are based on precise lab measurements of the headphones, and basically revert some of their flaws via digital processing.
Thanks for the tip. I also have the Sonys. Anyone who thinks they sound great needs a hearing test. Not a patch on my 2 favourites, Sennheiser HD-25 (or any €100+ Sennheiser for that matter) and Beyer Dynamic DT-990 Pro (great home listening and mixing headphone). Even after tuning the Sonys to correct their flaws they still sound tiring. Will check out the settings you recommend.
The DT-990 are not bad. The treble is a little overemphasized. The easy bass is also a bit emphasized, but then they give up on the deep bass (start dropping below 50 Hz). Still good headphones, two classes above the uncorrected Sony NC.
With proper corrections based on objective measurements, any headphones can sound neutral and balanced.
What you're hearing in the DT-990 is the open back. I'm not sure on your assessment regarding any headphone. you'll never get the noise cancelling ones sounding good because there are 2 processes affecting the sound. Also the hardware itself needs to be capable.
I have a pair of Bose QC20s which are (or were, when I bought them) state of the art for noise canceling, and have a 3.5mm headphone jack. No app required and they even work as normal wired headphones if the battery goes flat.
Same with the Sony WH1000 xm3. The only thing missing when working wired is the microphone, but I basically never use that anyway.
The problem with the wire, at least the provided one, is that it's pretty stiff so it picks up a lot of noise and the plug doesn't lock to the headphone side so I'm not sure how well it would hold during prolonged usage. But the plug is standard, so at least the cable can be changed easily.
This is a good point. Last I looked at the reviews, those were still state of the art for noise cancelling, if only because wired in-ears also have nice sound isolation. I should dust mine off...
I’ve had the best heat headphones Bose has to offer in the Quiet Comfort series and to me this “state of the art noise cancellation” sounds like artefact- and distortion-inducing noise.
I’ve returned them and replaced them with much better, naturally damping, closed head-phones. And the audio is so much better, at a fraction of the cost.
Noise cancellation in the hifi-space is just snake oil, and I’m not having it.
Does... does anyone actually think noise-cancelling is for increasing audio quality? I always thought it was just for handling obnoxiously noisy environments, like airplanes, screaming children, etc.
Aside, but noise cancelling (at least what's currently on the market) doesn't really do much for screaming children. It only handles relatively constant noise well, ideally low/mid-frequency constant noise. Great at silencing stuff like airplane engines, wind, HVAC hum, freeway rumble, etc. But not very effective for people talking, crying babies, car horns, ambulance sirens, slamming doors, etc.
> Does... does anyone actually think noise-cancelling is for increasing audio quality?
No, but noise cancelling headsets are often sold as premium headsets, with the obvious implication that they are to have high sound-quality. And quite often, they don’t.
No one who's thinking through how it works, which is by picking up the ambient noise and then modifying the output to include the inverse on top of whatever you're listening to.
usability and portability are what makes BT headphones great. Which BD or Shure gives me 10x the audio-performance while still being able to be used without cables (optionally)?
They're a company that makes a lot of decisions from the viewpoint of participants in a high-trust society like Japan. Many times, those viewpoints don't translate well to other markets.
That trust is hugely misplaced. They frequently make terrible decisions that negatively affect others.
- Them being hugely defensive about the fan backlash over Tlou2 https://www.altchar.com/game-news/sony-contacts-website-over...
- They've removed early release credentials from reviewers who give sour reviews
- The shit return policy for the digital only games
- The way they are trying to push digital only
etc.
I realize Sony isn't the only one doing this but with every iteration it feels like they are trying to be as crap as possible.
Hmmm....well, I'm at least aware of the issue now based on this conversation and will definitely at least try to determine whether it applies to any of my future purchases.
You have to do prior research. Bose don't tell you on the box that the headphones are bricked until you connect it to the app to do an update before it will allow you to connect it as a normal bluetooth device.
> I'm thinking / hoping it's sufficient to simply avoid headphones that require an app.
I'd hope so - as far as I know there's no way for a Bluetooth headset device to get internet access via the thing it's paired with. It's getting harder and harder to be confident about this kind of thing, though.
I've been using my Sony W-1000XM3s with my Android phone for months and I haven't had to install an app. The only thing the app would get me is a bunch of equalizer shit (which my music player could do and I never use anyway), dynamic noise cancelling of some form (which I'm not sure why I'd ever use, just an on/off toggle is good enough for me).
As shitty as the app collecting data is it isn't as if the app is required for me to have had an excellent experience with these headphones so I'm not really all that bothered that the app is invasive.
If any real functionality was locked behind it I'd be annoyed, but honestly the app seems like an afterthought with no real purpose other than "EVERYTHING NEEDS AN APP" type thinking.
First off, I say the following as kindly-spoken words :)
I'm grateful that you and I both know to be critically-minded, and we understand the difference between essential features and data-grabs, but honestly... my Dad needed me standing over the sketchy wifi thermostat (that required an app and Facebook login), loudly complaining about how invasive it was, to even understand that this was not OK and worth returning the product. And he's spent years osmosing conversations with his tech-savvy, upper-middle class son. Further, many people take for granted that they can trust a brand like Sony, so they're not in critical-thinking mode about this stuff -- it's quite confusing to know what is reasonable when you're just trying to get the thing done that was literally just a male-female plug before.
I do believe you're a caring person (most ppl are), but the practical effect of your position would lead someone to judge that you don't actually care about the data of the vast majority of normal people across many demographics. I kinda suspect that isn't true, so I'm wondering if maybe you'd find some dissonance in your own views on closer inspection <3
I do care about people's data in general, but also I don't recall the documentation for the device pushing the app much or at all and instead just suggesting you use whatever your device's way of connecting to bluetooth devices is, though I might be wrong there. If it did then it is a bit worse than I recall.
However if the app isn't really pushed at all then this is so minor an infraction compared to so many others happening in the technology space it honestly doesn't really illicit a response from me.
I do want to point out that not really giving a damn isn't the same as thinking it is a morally ok thing to do. I definitely agree that they shouldn't be doing it, but again given the state of the industry I'm honestly just glad the app isn't required.
Lastly I do kind of think personal responsibility has to enter into things somewhere. I understand that the average joe doesn't really understand how these work, and that the information you share is greater leakier than you might think it is given how things are phrased - and I absolutely agree that it is terrible. However for years now high profile data breaches have been a thing. The fact that the average joe hasn't defaulted to a "I don't understand why this device/app wants X information or how it could use it, therefore I won't use this app" is what is letting companies get away with this kind of thing in the first place. You don't need technical competence to be wary of this stuff (in fact I know someone who isn't technically competent who is concerned and they ask my opinion on things).
> this is so minor an infraction compared to so many others happening in the technology space...
Ah ok, that's understandable. I get desensitized to a lot of this too :)
> I do want to point out that not really giving a damn isn't the same as thinking it is a morally ok thing to do
Good point. I'm glad to be reminded of this :)
> Lastly I do kind of think personal responsibility has to enter into things somewhere.
Ah, this is prob the root of much of our divergence. I recognize that tons of my view emerge from my skepticism of what seems to me a cult of personal responsibility in the west. I lean much more toward collectivist mentalities, and suspect individualistic perspectives in USA are it's achilles heel.
The content and information flow of the world (and so a single life) has become densely packed with so much more context compared to 100 or so years ago when these ideals took form and served us. A founding principle of personal responsibility will increasingly fail us as we become emmersed in an ever-complexifying data and knowledge landscape. imho we can choose to be darwinian about that, or we can insist that our duty is to push knowledge and learning up through the system to _shared_ strata, to higher levels of societal abstraction beyond individual daily affairs. At least that's my hot take :)
Anyhow, thanks a ton for engaging! We may disagree, but your perspective got a lot more "real" to me as you shared :)
I'm definitely a collectivist when it comes to many things, and this is one of them. I just explained myself poorly. I think we should have legislation that prevents this kind of data vacuuming, or at least makes it more transparent to lay people. I'm from Australia too, not the US and we definitely are more collectivist in general than the US is.
The comment about personal responsibility is more representative of why I don't especially feel sympathy about this stuff on an emotional level anymore. We've had multiple, huge, public data breaches in years and the average citizen does not care. Hell in Australia we have some of the worst data privacy laws in the world. I wrote my member about it and only know one other person who did. The "personal responsibility" thing isn't a comment on people not reading the T&Cs, it is a comment on them letting the entire industry get away with this shit time and again.
The fact that people on the whole don't seem to care makes it hard for me to feel a good deal of emotional sympathy when it bites them at this point, even if I do feel they shouldn't have been bitten.
I am fervently glad that I'm happy with my WH-1000XM3 in its stock configuration. I took one look at what the permissions they wanted for the app, and said "No effing way."
I shouldn't have been too surprised, though, given that it was Sony that brought us rootkits on music CDs.
as far as i can tell, the only thing the app does is dynamically change the noise cancellation level based on your location and accelerometer, so if it doesn't have location permission it's kind of pointless to use the app.
the headphones still work fine without the app, they're just bluetooth headphones that the OS can interface with directly if you don't want the location-based profiles.
> Clicking "don't accept" pushes you back to the tos screen.
This is a textbook example of a GDPR violation. In fact, it is a clear violation of the first of the five requirements for consent.
See recital 43:
"... Consent is presumed not to be freely given if it does not allow separate consent to be given to different personal data processing operations despite it being appropriate in the individual case, or if the performance of a contract, including the provision of a service, is dependent on the consent despite such consent not being necessary for such performance."
I have the WH-1000XM2 and the location permission is optional if you want the app to change noise cancelling profiles according to what you are doing (walking, running, on the bus). The ear scanner is another optional thing you can do to improve the 360 audio which only works on a few apps.
This was raised when Australia rolled out its' Contract tracing app.
On Android if you need bluetooth access you have to ask for locat ion access, because it's possible to derive location from bluetooth data. (Like wifi data).
I tend to use passive headphones with 3.5mm jack, they have no electronics in them except the small speakers. They do not collect data. They are also used by musicians when doing audio mixing so its should sounds neutral and good.
That the headphones does not have electronics and batteries means they will last longer and thus be be better for the environment.
There is an even easier analysis. If you were designing your own headphones just for your own use, would you have them collect personal data? If your answer is no, then choosing headphones that do not collect data is a logical choice.
The author cites some idea of "trading" ongoing collection of personal data^1 for features but I can't see how that applies here, assuming the user has already paid for the product, e.g., he has already paid for the headphpones.
1. This does not appear to be a one-time, voluntary submission of data by the purchaser. For example, submitting one's name and a product serial number in order to register for a warranty.
I'd put it a bit differently. If I were designing headphones for my own use, would I have them collect personal data and then give that data to somebody else. I like collecting statistics about myself, because they are interesting. For example, tracking exactly when I go to sleep, start my commute (pre-corona, that is), go on errands. But that is data that is for my use, and not something that I would trust in somebody else's hands.
For headphones, I could see tracking the usage by day, and by time of day. I could see tracking the average volume, the dynamic range, the frequency ranges used. How often do I spend listening to music, to conference presentations, to movies? Those would be fun data to have, but not something that I'd want under the control of a different party for privacy reasons.
Usually depends on who controls that remotely accessible shared computer. If it is under my control, or under the control of somebody I personally trust, then yes. If it is under the control of somebody else, then no.
Partly, that is because I've been coming to the conclusion that the privacy promises of a company are rather meaningless. In the case of bankruptcy, collected data is treated as an asset, rather than as a liability to be disposed of properly. In the case of acquisition, the database gets transferred to a parent company. For example, with Google buying Fitbit, they will have have access to all data collected by Fitbit. Though (as of yesterday), Google is stating that they don't intend to use this for advertising, I don't trust that not to be "accidentally" merged with google tracking ids in the future.
Indeed, I do not mean to suggest that shared computing is necessarily a net negative. Sharing a remotely accessible computer among trusted friends/family has always been an interesting idea to me because it would allow such easy communication. The way I see it, this is the core idea that underlies "e-mail" on UNIX. A group of people sharing accounts on a computer. UNIX allows easy messaging between accounts. Another group doing the same thing on another computer. Connect the two computers over a telephone line and now we have messaging to people in another group. Today, if you and I can both connect to the same computer, where we both have accounts, that is still an easy way to do messaging, in my opinion. Computers are no longer prohibitively expensive. There is no requirement that the computer belong to a third party. The ongoing problem however is that there needs to be someone who can administer the computer. It is not easy enough for anyone to do. It seems the "sysadmin" is still needed as much today as in the past.
Also, for phone calls and conferencing, wired headsets have neglible latency, compared to bluetooth, which is likely at least 100ms. In itself, this isn't terrible, but add the other latencies in (e.g. wifi, inter-city network). Our brains do a great job of compensating, but I'm starting to think that this compensating comes at a cost (headaches, tiredness), especially if you're on conferences all day as many are in remote work.
Even though I get your point and I am convinced you're using "simple" aptly, I will nitpick the obvious: passive headphones can be deceptively simple or a marvel of engineering.
If you didn't get the chance to listen to some music through proper audiophile headphones, I do recommend to spend some time at the closest audio retailer and live the experience.
From the many people I have asked this question, I think the disconnect between toilet phone users and us is the availability of "Alone time".
Specifically no matter what you do in your house/work for some there is always low key chance of someone bothering you. This is not the case when you appear to be using the toilet.
One port, singular -- there's not enough knee real estate for multiple devices.
Open the laundry chute, it's in there along with a Thinkpad brick, both wired up from the basement. Ends have magnets that captivate them to the chute door for safe keeping.
A joke about "ports" or "drops" in the bathroom is trying to form itself in my mind, but I am actively suppressing it to protect myself and the community.
most phone support USB-C to ethernet. Always remember their are weirdos out there who are so into mobile games they have docked phones attached to cooling systems.
> they will last longer and thus be be better for the environment
This isn’t necessarily true.
My wireless headphones have been with me for years. My wired earbuds are cheap enough that I can lose or damage them without care. The former are far better for the environment.
My Sennheiser HD25 have been with me for 10 years and I stepped on them, dropped them used them outside in the rain, in sub zero degrees and three times a week while jogging.
10 years of that is a heavy thing to survive. In fact I know hardly any object that would have survived this long.
My Sennheiser RS180 died a few month ago after about 8 years or so. They had normal rechargeable batteries, but it seems it was something else that broke down (the batteries got replaced a few times).
For my Sennheiser MB 660 I just replaced the ear cushions after about 3 years, but I am still 'worried' that some day the built-in battery will give up. Not because I can't afford new ones, but because I hate if a product dies due to an old battery.
I own a few wired headphones/headsets, but there is none I used as much as my RS180 and when I think about it, I doubt that the cable would have survived the usage. Actually, I had to repair one of the wired headset once. The MB 660 can be used with a (removable) cable, but I use it only on airplanes or when the device I want to use has neither USB (dongle) nor Bluetooth.
While I am privacy savvy person, my bigger concern is about health. Having an active unit all day in such proximity to my brain, makes me wonder if they are actually that safe to use.
I wonder if wireless ones can be hijacked and requested to produce and ultra loud pulse to damage hearing. I suppose that's possible with wired ones buy I guess you'd need to broadcast plenty of energy for them to pick up, which makes it impractical, whereas with wireless ones you just need to get control of the signal. I'm guessing though.
Depends on the type of wireless headphone. I can envision that as possible if you can break Bluetooth encryption and crank up the volume, but there are RF wireless headphones where the digital signal doesn't contain volume level, which is entirely on-device and only controllable with physical buttons.
I bought $100 wired 'gaming' headphones 8 years ago and they still sound amazing and are as comfortable as when I bought them. I didn't give a shit about handling them well, since they were only $100 and seemed to have a very durable construction. The earpads are starting to get torn up from use, but those cost $10 to replace. The headband cushion is nonreplaceable but is only just starting to show any wear now.
Well-built wireless headphones have a lifespan of a few years; well-built wired headphones have a lifespan of ∞, as long as they are designed so that the wear parts can be replaced (earcups, headband cushion, cable).
Yes I had some 555’s for almost 18 years of DAILY use and abuse and the band up top eventually broke. I could replace it if parts weren’t more than a new pair.
The problem is that your wired headphones might break if you're not careful, but if you don't then they will work essentially forever. Your wireless headphones on the other hand will break at some point because the tiny lithium battery inside them will eventually stop holding charge. It's not a question of if but when.
As an addition to you post: my wired headphones do break, but I can solder things at maybe a .1 mm scale. With wireless headphones repairability is beyond my ability in many cases.
I am aware that most wireless headphones use built-in batteries nowadays, but strictly speaking, your argument doesn't relate to wireless headphones, but to products with non-replaceable batteries.
The Sennheiser RS180, for example, had rechargeable and replaceable batteries inside. Ironically, mine died a few months ago, but I am still not sure what the cause was.
Well duh. Obviously if you buy cheap headphones and constantly replace them that's bad for the environment. The grandparents point was that if you buy good wired headphones and use them for the same amount of time you'd use wireless ones it's far better for the environment.
Of course it's not a universal rule. But apples-to-apples, with a wired vs. wireless set of similar construction, cost, and intended use, the wired will outlast the wireless, solely due to the battery (not to mention the other complexities inherent to a wireless set).
> apples-to-apples, with a wired vs. wireless set of similar construction, cost, and intended use
These aren’t independent variables. Most consumers I know will pay more for wireless headphones. They’re more convenient, and they’re anchored at a higher price point.
As such, I’ve watched lots of friends go from buying cheap earbuds monthly to having a pair of AirPods for years.
There is a lot of moralising around wired versus wireless. I’m pushing back against that fad.
Seems to me that the baseline assumption should be if you spend more, net, on the wireless (or wired) headphones, the environmental impact is probably greater. A million reasons can be given why the cost isn't exactly proportional to the environmental impact, but any time someone starts by assuming it's unrelated, I think they are probably not making good decisions.
Me, too! I use the $1 ones from Dollar Tree. They are easy to replace, come with microphones if desired, and work just as well on calls as expensive solutions. They don't always last as long, but purchasing 10 at a time fixes that.
Drugstores in Brazil are doing it and that concerns me A LOT.
Their modus operandi is to ask you your CPF (it's like an SSN, but not that secret and powerful) and, if you refuse to tell them, you are not eligible for some discounts which can reach 40% in some more expensive items.
Customers happily agree to give their CPFs, completely unaware they are of the potentially disastrous consequences, and we are not even offered something resembling a privacy policy.
Think of the uses of such data. Health insurers could use them to detect and even predict health issues. One could estimate menstrual cycles and even the size of your genitalia.
A Brazilian data protection law is about to become active within the next weeks, but honestly.. such data shouldn't even be collected at all.
I'm looking for support for a bill to forbid drugstores to collect CPFs and to offer any sort of discount to people who identify themselves, but I believe this should be more publicized before being discussed for voting by the Congress. The more active drugstores on the "data business" are part of huge chains and their lobby will definitely be massive. Society should be aware of that and counterbalance for such lobby.
There are commercial services which allows companies to query government's database to check a given CPF's situation.
But they usually don't confirm that the number you give actually belongs to you. I always give a bogus, yet valid number (123.456.789-09). It's usually mapped to a customer, so somebody has already had the same idea or it's the remainders of a test database. They frown sometimes (actual CPFs follow very distinct number patterns) but didn't complain so far.
They don't insist that you use a credit or debit card, which are much more common than cash over here. I couldn't confirm yet, but I suspect that they have access to some identification of yours whenever you use a card, so I usually pay in cash, which is pretty annoying because they never have change.
This is a good point. I often "misspell" private information if its not an official form. If someone had more motivation, they could do a "different-secure-number-per-provider" trick and work out who leaked the information.
That's a good idea. I also feed fake data to those "extra-official" enlistments. But never thought about keeping a control to discover the responsible for the occasional leak.
In Brazilian drugstores, there are legitimate situations where they actually need your data, e.g., when you need some injectable medicine. In such cases, they need to send an official notice for government control, BUT they also ask you for an original document.
P.S.: one might argue that government shouldn't have access to data about injectable medicines you take. Personally, given the severe situation regarding drug-abuse of countries like ours, USA and others, I see some valid motivation in such tight controls.
That's an interesting thought. The european GDPR and I think the california CCPA have some sort of clause that says if you decide not to allow, you have to be treated the same.
But loyalty discount cards and your drugstore example should have a way to get the discount without giving up your anonymity. This would be better for society.
I can't see other way than entirely forbid drugstores from having loyalty/rewards programs based on personal identification.
They would be allowed to ask for your information when buying through app/web, but could never give you discounts or incentives of any sort for buying through such platforms.
And that wouldn't mean they couldn't have a loyalty program: they could give customers stamps on paper cards, paper seals and alikes. It may sound archaic, but some big supermarket chains use this method regularly and it works pretty well.
Good to know about such clauses in GDPR and CCPA. I didn't take the time yet to read our own law in detail. I've read that it's gotten much inspiration from GDPR, but the articles I've read so far didn't mention such clauses, being more focused instead on aspects regarding data storing and sharing with third-parties.
I'm going to read it thoroughly within the next days.
It has a lot of rules with sharing with unrelated usage, whatever entity is using them (first or third party). On practice, that means they'll have to disclose every way they'll use the data, and get authorization for each one.
It doesn't restrict sharing it by itself, it's just that the third party will use the data, and thus will need your authorization.
Truly, is it possible for tech companies today to release even one fucking product, even something so simple as headphones, without piling on all the desperate, grubby, scummy tracking bloat and related shit possible in an effort to turn you into a product EVEN when you're paying for their creations. It's revolting and sincerely deserves to be harshly punished by the market (if enough consumers could be bothered to give enough of a shit about something so "irrelevant" as their basic privacy).
You're not even as high-status as 'product' (let alone 'customer') - you're the 'fuel' - for an ad product, bought by ad customers. You're the coal being burned - all for profit and power.
Yes, my analogy doesn't go too far. We're sentient coal, being fed bread and circuses as the trade-off for being burned away. We still have some choice, power, and control.
My exasperated comment isn't meant to deny that products like these don't exist, it's more of a recrimination of those companies (and they are far too many, with it becoming steadily more habitual among them all the time) which simply can't keep themselves from squeezing and grubbing and pawing at our personal information for the sake of every last drop of monetization taken to disgusting levels of disrespect even for paying customers. All of it justified by cliche boilerplate nonsense about "caring for your' privacy" while they cram as much of the opposite down your throat as possible.
I don't care that maybe, just maybe, company X doesn't sell my personal information as a user of theirs to third parties (though I steadily doubt more and more about the claims of any company promising that it doesn't, and then there are also unintentional data leaks of things they supposedly don't keep stored) I also want goddam company X itself to not pry into my life so much just because I use a fucking pair of headphones or a blender, or a refrigerator or any number of other products that are being designed more often by the day to track everything you do with them and feed it all back to their creators. The sheer arrogance of the whole trend deserves much more criticism than it gets.
> You mean like Beats or Apple AirPods? They don’t collect user data at all.
They may not, but Beats and Apple — the former is a subsidiary of the latter — lock one into a proprietary ecosystem in which your data is not your data (just try sharing iCloud photos with Android users), you have no right to run, view, modify or share the software you depend on, your message security rests 100% on the corporate goodwill of Apple and any government which can force Apple to do its will (your iMessages are end-to-end encrypted … to whatever keys Apple says belong to your correspondents; Apple can add new keys at will). And of course Apple are also doing their best to replace the standard headphone jack with crufty, battery-draining, CPU-requiring Bluetooth.
Headphones capable of running Bluetooth are headphones capable of collecting data about you, because they need some sort of processor to speak the Bluetooth protocol. Headphones which are composed of wire and drivers aren't capable of anything other than playing or receiving audio.
Only a slightly related tangent, but most headphones and other loudspeakers can be very effective microphones when wired into the right circuit.
While speakers are often wired directly to a one-way DAC, that's not always the case. Sometimes the analog lines are all fed into a multiplexer and it can be routed to a ADC. Sometimes it's wired to a general purpose IO pin.
In such cases, reprogramming could turn that speaker into a microphone. I wonder if anyone has exploited this in the wild yet.
You can do the opposite of noise cancellation too: determine the back emf from the speaker compared to the audio input, that will give you the audio in the room. So you can use the same circuit both to drive the speaker and use it as a microphone. As good as undetectable until you trace the circuitry of what looks like an ordinary amplifier. The difference is on the order of a few mV but that's more than enough.
My personal favorite is the laser attack that turns any shiny surface into a microphone. When it's not on it literally isn't there.
If you are a hacker who removed microphones from your computer but is worrying about this exploit, fortunately, a simple mitigation is possible - just put an audio amplifier or unity-gain buffer between the speaker and the audio output port, so the audio signal cannot travel back to the audio chip. Any "Hi-Fi" headphone amplifier can be used, but a $0.5 opamp is enough - a daughterboard can be tiny enough to fit inside a laptop.
When I was younger, I was wondering what it would feel like to to feel 'left behind' by technology. I remember helping so many adults to navigate a world they didn't understand. They'd ask "left click or right click?" every time I asked them to use their mouse. They just couldn't grasp some of the context.
This is not quite the same thing, but I'm starting to feel that perhaps I am starting to witness that same disconnect. Having read the title alone, I wondered "how are the headphones collecting data?" Oh, there's an app. Why would you need an app for headphones? It simply never occurred to me.
We just should to stop tolerating conventional things using Internet connection. There is no way headphones really need an Internet-connected app to work and even to let you use advanced functions (i.e. all the configuration can be implemented in a purely offline app). And if they don't need they should not even nudge, let alone require, you to install such. Most of the people just don't give a uck, somebody competent on the state level should give it.
The move to no-jack phones really only exacerbates this problem.
It's difficult for manufacturers to justify an app for wired headphones, but, now that bluetooth is becoming the new norm, there's suddenly a justification for instrusive, data-collecting apps.
This whole story is a really good reason for keeping headphone jacks on phones.
Technology moves on. The same shift also happened with cars. I remember when there was pushback (ok at least hearing about the pushback) when cars started to use computers. Why does it have to so complicated? Why does everything need a computer?
You know to a certain extent those folks were right. But you look at cars today and I couldn't imagine my car not having a computer. Adaptive cruise control, lane keep assist, apple carplay, I could go on.
The problem I see now is that privacy is still a pretty novel concept among the regular user so companies in the mean time can get away with overbearing data collection. My prediction is in the next 3-5 years, users will start to get savvier, and overbearing data collection will become a taboo and no company will do it because users will revolt.
I would rather give up on a smartphone than give up on my wireless headphones. Hell, I was without a phone for a few months a couple of years back and it felt liberating. It’ll be my excuse to be a permanent smartphone luddite.
I did the same, went without a phone for a few weeks (getting repaired/replaced) and it taught me a lot about how much I was overusing it. The most important change was turning off nearly all notifications (interruptions), but I've slid back into other bad habits like mobile reddit/HN since.
I've toyed with the idea of going back to a dedicated MP3 player for music and audio books, they should be cheaper and smaller than the last time I had one and with actual buttons they have a superior user interface (phones are versatile but a bit shit at everything). After that I could probably ditch a smart phone entirely.
I actually made a conscious effort not to idly listen to music anymore, so when I listen now, its purely for the enjoyment of listening to music. When I go for a walk, I listen to nature and let my mind drift without constant stimulation. I enjoy the music a lot more this way.
Yeah, I find 90% of what I use my iphone fir, I could really do without, like social media. When this phone dies, I plan on getting a cheap dumb one for emergency calls (I can still communicate with friends over IM on a laptop) and not replace the smartphone.
The experience taught me that I do not need to be stimulated all the time and I don’t need to be connected or reachable all the time. It felt liberating knowing that when I left home/office and was out of wifi reach, that I wouldnn’t get bothered by work requests. It felt liberating knowing that, while inconveint at times, I had to arrange a time and place to meet people, and we had to thennstick to it, instead of “i’ll call you when I’m near, whenever ir whetever that may be”.
The only reason I went back to having a phone is a family member got annoyed and bought me one, but a middle ground would have been to get a dumb (phone calls and SMS only) phone, rather than a smartphone or going without a phone completely like I did.
Everyone, including headphone manufacturers, are trying to get in on the gold rush that is turning their customers into fonts of personal data that can be sold to the highest bidder.
I see this sentiment mentioned a lot, but who actually pays for this data? Is there a company I can call that will buy my amorphous "user data"? What are their names?
Say I have a database full of metrics, user agents, IPs, GPS, names, addresses, photos, etc. on a million users, who would I call to sell it? Genuinely curious.
Here's a list of approximately a hundred companies that acquire and sell data in various ways, some of whom would plausibly be interested in your hypothetical trove of data:
One part of CCPA is that data brokers have to register themselves with the Attorney General if they trade in the data of California residents. The registry is public. You could start there.
The obvious reason is money and a lack of ethics, but the dogwhistle reason is that these headphones are supposed to be used with a health and fitness app.
I don't know if this counts and I haven't seen it outside of research projects, but 3D spatialization (that's worth a damn) basically requires it be tuned for the user's particular head geometry.
The top end Sony headphones actually ask for a photo of your ears to do exactly this. It's only for use with the fancy spatially aware apps - pretty much only Deezer does this at the moment?
I signed up for a free trial (and I did send a photo of my ears), but I couldn't tell the difference and the HD library was so small it didn't seem worth paying monthly for it.
I use Bluetooth headphones, but almost never use or bother to set up the associated app. So hopefully Bluetooth pairing alone isn’t enough. Looks a lot of these details are collected through a companion app.
Yes me too. I really never install such apps, because they are always bad in many ways. I just wanna a bluethoot speaker or headphone. I really don't care for the mostly useless fancy software things. And most of the times, it's even possible to use these things also with a 3.5mm jack
Sometimes these apps are necessary though. For instance you can only turn the Google Assistant button off on Sony headphones in their app, there's an additional (better!) noise reduction mode only available through the app, firmware updates are through the app, etc. (I get the firmware updates because I'm vaguely hoping that one day they will fix the hilariously annoying flaw that they turning them on always activates noise cancellation.)
When I got my bose headphones they would not connect as bluetooth headphones until I installed the app. After that they would but I still had to sign up and accept location access the first time.
I see a number of people saying this but I was able to pair mine without an app. Installing the app didn’t require location access.
There’s also several people saying their experience was like mine.
It’s pretty obvious different people are getting two distinctly different experiences with the company. It’s not a spectrum, just one or the other. That is strange and I wonder was the cause of that is.
I think I can answer this. My mum got the Bose QC 35 and out of the box they worked fine without the app. I got the exact same thing about a few months later and after turning it on it just repeated some audio telling me to connect to the app which did not happen on the exact same product my mum had. Perhaps mine came with a newer firmware version OOTB.
As for location, android requires it for an app to scan for bluetooth devices (Not required if you connect via android settings). Maybe you use iOS?
I've come to believe that this can only be fixed with legislation and regulation. There are no technical fixes that could practically be deployed as there is far too much "attack surface" and anyway there is zero incentive to deploy them.
In the meantime: install as few apps as possible on phones, be careful about IoT and personal assistance devices, and use Apple or Linux (not Android) based systems as they seem to have the best record for security and privacy.
iOS exploits are cheaper than Android exploits because they are so plentiful. Plenty of apps on iOS have been caught activating the camera or snooping on the clipboard on iPhones.
iOS seems to be more privacy oriented (for the western market, where the government does not yet have the power to force them to comply) by default, while android needs more work put in. If you did as much as you could to secure both I'd agree with you that android is more secure.
When you buy food there's a label on the package that tells you what's in it.
When you buy cigarettes there's a big warning label about the risk to your health.
I think consumer devices need something like that. Imagine browsing an aisle and seeing a label on the package like "WARNING: These earbuds phone home with the track names you play, your GPS location and menstruation cycle history." How many people do you think will buy that box vs. the cheap $20 pair with the analog plug?
But... they do. When you install the app, people routinely agree with "This app wants access to your contact list, storage, internet, and to run at startup". But I get your point, it should be on the box, before you buy the hardware. Currently they can easily argue that you can install the software from appstore, check the required permissions, before even buying the hardware. But that's not enough.
Re: Personal fitness and menstruation history - Is that shocking? They're earbuds, but they're marketed as fitness buds that track personal data. It looks like Fitbit for your ears. Fitbit and Apple Health (or whatever it is called) does these kinds of things as well.
Re: Bose collecting all that stuff
I can see "why" they would want all that, in order to optimize their sound output of their buds to the kind of music and environments for which they are used. That should, of course, be opt-in, but I don't think it is evil.
Do I necessarily like the latter example? No. I believe, like the "cookie policies" that exist on many websites, there should be "Needed permissions" and "Please thank you" permissions, and they should incentivize the consumer to help them out. Amazon does this on their Kindles: $20 off if you let them run ads on the lock screen.
But if all the manufacturers do this, then what competition is there to push them to change?
Ordinarily when you pay $350 for headphones it is assumed that the vendor has already invested money in doing R&D to make them work properly and isn't planning to do testing on you without telling you or compensating you for it, to enable the functionality you already paid for.
I bought headphones, I did not sign up for a research project.
We went from paying for software to getting it for free in return for our data and now we're apparently giving over our data even for physical devices that we pay top dollar for.
> ow we're apparently giving over our data even for physical devices that we pay top dollar for.
This is the thing that really bugs me. I don't like the user is the product aspect but I can at least understand it in a free setting. In a high case luxury setting where you aren't even getting a discount? That's just absurd. All they've done is increase their bottom end, give you no choice and no discount.
I see this as only another example of how markets with too little, or the wrong kind of regulation so easily creates anti consumer, or anti environment, etc behavior.
... Which makes total sense from a market efficiency point of view, at least as long consumers doesn't have perfect information and the time to stay informed about almost everything. Which isn't true, and people won't be, especially since the most basic decision theory that we can derive from our behavior would go almost entirely counter this.
... Which isn't strange at all as the number of new or changing facts that could affect our living situation probably didn't change as much from 150000 years ago, as changed last week alone.
Sometimes I think one of, or maybe the most damaging lie of our century is that we are generally capable of individual, rational thought for everyday decisions. We really are not, not to any significant fraction.
Almost all our decision are derived from observation of very few instances, judging based on survival instincts, and social cost/benefits.
In contrast much of rules regarding eg advertising and much of economic theory seems predicates that everyone has the time and energy to figure out which toothpaste company also are not totally exploiting some workers in some country five shell companies and thousands of miles away. But I digress.
> I can see "why" they would want all that, in order to optimize their sound output of their buds to the kind of music and environments for which they are used.
I can't see why they would need so many samples. Wouldn't using the data from (say) 100 Bose employees be sufficient to cover most noisy environments these buds are used in?
If you're trying for perfection, then not even remotely, no. The type of data provided by "one million users" will uncover issues that "one hundred users" simply never can.
I believe it was iOS 10 or 11 developer betas that would, on each beta update, run a trial APFS conversion process against the phone's internal filesystem, check the result for consistency, and then discard the replica and report success/failure w/ logs — so that Apple could find the issues that they couldn't find at 'one hundred users' scale.
There's a famous Bose bughunt article that proves this not to be the case. I can't find where they posted it on a blog or something but here's the forum link:
Ah yes, company speak for "collecting massive amounts of personal data for our profits and your detriment." It's clear now with the fitbit reference that this is mainly a spying device.
They don't. The app may ask for it, and there may be some benefit to the user if they provide it, but it's not like the headphones magically acquire any of the data the author is complaining about.
If people want to give their personal information out, that's up to them. I personally limit what information I share, and I get annoyed when devices or apps try to sneakily get more information than I'm willing to intentionally provide, but this article is silly.
The younger generation has grown up without a sense of personal privacy, and they're largely ok with it. They will happily give away personal details in exchange for a "free" app or product, and they bend over backwards to expose their entire lives via images and videos on social media. There's always mock outrage when someone "discovers" that the reason the Internet is free is because someone is selling personal data to drive advertising, but everyone knows that. Most people just don't care.
They care. It exudes as a cynicism about the world and continual jokes about talking to the FBI agent assigned to watch them. They (as are we) are just powerless to prevent it as every single service and every single platform and apparently every single product is collecting data on us. And since the value of services and platforms and, sadly, even products goes up as more people are using them, the arguments of "don't use these products and vote with your dollars" that people constantly push are nonsensical: you can value your privacy but also value having a romantic partner, and most people these days use dating apps to date; you can value your privacy but also value getting invited to the birthday party, and most people these days invite everyone to their party on a social network; you can value your privacy but also value being able to travel, and so unless you want to be the one insane person in your friend group who doesn't use Lyft/Uber and never knows when the public transportation is running late and takes forever to book hotels (and always ends up spending a lot more when you do)... well, you are going to use a bunch of apps that do a bunch of data collection.
That sounds like you do have a choice: spend more money. In a world where this wasn't allowed, presumably you'd be forced to spend more money. So you can inhabit that world right now if you want.
We're talking about a companion app for one of the most expensive consumer headphones you can get ( $350 ).
I don't think this is about money, this is about using dark patterns and morally questionable behavior to get user data.
Yes, if you're older and wiser you can work around these, disable the app location data, etc. But a lot of people are oblivious to this, not because they don't care but because they are being purposefully deceived.
Sure, but they deserve to be able to make the choice too. So if you move to a world where selling your data for services isn't available, then you're forcing them to pay and since we've determined they can't pay, all you're doing is removing the choice from them and forcing them in to the no-service option.
And I know how it is because I was once affected by this. All these "but the poor people" folks disappear when the poor actually ask for help. It's like this:
Poor people: Hey, can we get the right to work for a living in a dignified way and use the same services as everyone else?
The Privileged Protectors: Okay, how about I make it so you can't work for more than 20 hrs and umm... I'll throw in some privacy
>So if you move to a world where selling your data for services isn't available, then you're forcing them to pay and since we've determined they can't pay, all you're doing is removing the choice from them and forcing them in to the no-service option.
Like this is the only option... We already see a lot of services that sell multiple tiers of their products, with power users or larger companies paying significantly more.
Bose and Sony, 2 of the most expensive tech product companies, are the example here. The option is buy your sub $10 wired skull candy earbuds and ignore anything that's more expensive because it isn't an option. It's the same reason recent generations grew p on fast food, it's cheaper and easier and all some people have resources for.
I’ve lived in a world similar to that. It was called the 1990s. It wasn’t particularly expensive, it wasn’t that hard to book hotels and, amazingly, people also got invited to parties and events. Also, your headphones didn’t spy on you.
This is how you know you were wealthy. Everything was so much more expensive then. I remember even trying to get maps or a digital marker for where you were required so much money. Noise canceling headphones? Forget about it.
And if you weren't in America with money, you could barely do anything online.
Hotels, air travel? So expensive. Way cheaper now. TVs? So cheap now. And where I lived you couldn't even book your own flights at the time. You needed a travel agent. Up costs. Nightmare.
I can assure you I'm not wealthy and never have been, other than in the sense of me living in the west (though not the US). My point is that life can be pretty damn decent without digital markers for where you are, constant air travel and a new TV every other year.
Yes, certain things have gotten more affordable. But is affordable noise cancelling headphones and cheap air travel really the result of apps and websites crawling up our backsides with a microscope and shuffling that data to some unknown other?
Air travel in the 1990s was much cheaper than, say, in the 1950s, much like computers, TV:s and headphones. In fact, the price of air travel dropped by roughly 1/3 between 1980 and 1995[0].
Evidence suggests that happened completely without constant digital surveillance.
Just like with air travel, TV:s have gotten larger and cheaper for a long, long time before data harvesting even existed as a factor. Yes, the price of TV:s are continuing to drop. Mostly because of cheaper panels. Of course manufacturers claim that TV:s would be unsellably expensive without telemetry, but then again, they make lots of money off it and "cheap" is a neat way to justify that.
Current prices might've taken a bit longer to reach without telemetry - although the latest most significant price drops occurred a decade ago or more, well before spy TV:s were baseline models.
Today, you can buy a 32" monitor for $200, and they've not yet begun spying on us. For pure screen real estate, yes, it costs more than a 55" model. But is it "expensive"? Heck, would it be "expensive" if it was a 28" CRT, like the one my current LCD TV replaced a decade ago?
Sacrificing privacy for constant upgrades to something bigger and ostensibly better is, to reply in kind, if anything a kind of wealth blindness: What could possibly go wrong to anyone who owns a 55 inch TV?
Bullshit. People don't care. You don't even have to go so far as not to use certain applications. In this particular case, if people didn't buy iPhones en masse, we probably wouldn't be dealing with wireless headphones because neither Google nor Android phone manufacturers have cared to be innovators on the hardware end.
I dunno... when it comes to the tiny things this article is talking about I really don’t care. This all seems like outrage in the name of a few clicks. That annoys me way more than my headphones asking to know how long I use them each day.
I'm wondering if someone could file HIPAA complaint at them and get these things classified as Medical Devices and shut this sharing of bio data down. A simple opt-out doesn't fly with HIPAA. It requires a signature that you will allow another person to access your medical records.
Give me a dumb pair of headphones with a 3.5mm jack and I'm happy.
Edit: Thinking about this article more, it really goes back to hardware not getting funding unless there's a model for recurrent income. It's going to get a LOT worse before we either wise up or give up.
To those only looking for the noise cancelling component of modern headphones: I was only interested in this as I already have a good pair of (wired, offline) hi-fi headphones, and given some HN comments on this I decided for Peltor x5a passive noise cancelling earmuffs. No batteries to charge and become disfunctional with time, no spy-apps, no potential hearing damage from ANC (not sure what the status is here), no cables, no bluetooth issues; and you get Peltors for 15-30$ so no problem if they break because you stored them in the bottom of a bag. My growing collection of low tech might look a bit dorky but I love it.
Just value adds, you can listen just fine without them. You might lose (in the case of the headphones that lead to the article) some fitness tracking features, ANC or EQ fine-tuning, or other additional functionality but they'll work just fine for audio.
Bose has a computer-based firmware updater over USB, I used it with their relatively new noise cancelling 700 headphones since I don't use the Bose Music app. Website launches a Windows desktop application for the update. Worked great in a Windows virtual machine with USB passthrough.
For older QC35 headphones there's a 'based-connect' repo on github that lets you configure the headphones; unfortunately the newer models such as the NC700 have encrypted firmware update files so I couldn't easily reverse engineer the protocol to get all the BT commands to configure all the options you can change in the app. Actually the app didn't even work on my Android phone without GApps, so I couldn't sniff the connection either...
The digital video transition has been a net good, though I will say analog output is easier, takes fewer resources, but those are plentiful. No worries.
Audio isn't the same. All existing gear remains relevant.
The data collection is something I hate viscerally.
Exactly, it will be a cold day in hell before I buy a pair of headphones that I have to charge on order to make them work or have any "smart" features.
I broke down when I finally found good noise cancelling headphones that will continue working without battery. The annoying part now is that layering pass through audio of the outside world on top of what I'm listening to has become pretty nice.
I see a lot of people talking about Bose and Sony and their awful apps, but there are alternatives! I have been using my Sennheiser PXC 550's for almost a year now with no software updates or other nonsense. If it has an app, I certainly don't know about it. About the only complaint I have is how easy it is to accidentally hang up on someone with the touch controls on the ear. Normally I support more organized solutions, but this seems like a clear case of voting with your wallet.
My LG washer dryer app needs to know my location... why? They won’t let me add it without giving app location access.. so does the YI camera now.. this is getting a bit out of hand.
Has anyone had any experience with new Bose headphones? If you use the Bose Connect app, I believe what the author wrote is accurate. But that app doesn’t work on the newer headphones (at least, not the ones I have). Instead I need to download the “Bose Music” app which doesn’t seem to give you the same options for privacy. And if you don’t use that app, the headphones are much less useful (eg, no hardware controls to switch which device you are connected to).
Why do you think they made a new app to begin with? the piracy policy is the same, its just after the media hype died down they saw no reason to add the opt out
If I had the resources, I would establish an organization for privacy badges for products. From "absolutely anonymous", through "necessary violations of privacy for function" till "unnecessary harvesting of data".
Till such an organization for handing out badges will exist, it will be a hard task to buy any hardware and being able to trust its privacy.
With GDPR in place, "unnecessary harvesting of data" should in theory be a thing in the past (unless the user explicitly makes a voluntary choice to opt-in after being informed of the options).
Reality is different, but NGOs can in theory sue to make reality align better with the intent of GDPR. NOYB (https://noyb.eu) is supposed to be such an NGO, and they seem to be doing a decent job so far, although they're limited in what they can do with their resources, facing a never-ending wall of vendors that blatantly violate GDPR.
Afaik GDPR allows harvesting of data as long as I agree to that in the user agreement. The problem is of course that more than once I found out the user agreements after purchasing the product, when it was too late.
Option a), consent, is further regulated later. The key aspect is https://gdpr-info.eu/recitals/no-43/ "Consent is presumed not to be freely given if (...) the provision of a service, is dependent on the consent despite such consent not being necessary for such performance". Further requirements in https://gdpr-info.eu/recitals/no-32/
Each option only lets them process the data to the extent necessary, so if they can argue that they need the data to provide a service (option b), they can only use it for that, not for e.g. resale. I think a court also clarified that "but we need it to show personalized ads" doesn't count.
I don't think anyone tried to argue that ads or other common ways to monetize data are in the public interest, and such an attempt would likely not stand.
Option f (legitimate interest) also seems to be popular, but I think that again, a court clarified that invasive tracking for ads doesn't meet the balance.
The problems with GDPR are really more on the enforcement side: The DPAs are overwhelmed and in some cases (Ireland) they seem to be rather keen on not doing their job. Also, it's hard to enforce GDPR against companies that are outside the EU.
As someone with both Bose QC IIs and the Sony WH-1000MX, this is annoying but not much I can do about it - they're expensive and I doubt I could resell them for as much (would reselling even be ethical now?). I also really like noise cancelling, especially now I am working from home.
I mean you can just not use the apps, can’t you? The headphones don’t magically ship data home through the device. The app is what you agree to their privacy policy through and is what reads all the metadata through usage and then sends it home. I deleted all of my headphone apps the first time I saw the note about sending all audio titles to Bose in the privacy policies.
I have both Beats Wireless noise cancelling headphones (provided by work) and Bose wireless noise cancelling..
I have never even thought about downloading the apps for either of them. I never even thought to consider if they have apps. I just bluetooth to my phone and listen to music.
I just went on 2 12+ hour flights and every few minutes my phone had a "These aren't your airpods" or similar message. I had no airpods, they were someone elses on the flights, but they still interacted with my phone often.
For now, Bose QuietComforts appear to pair just fine with Bluetooth without requiring the Bose Connect app, so that's how I've been using them. I'm afraid that non-smart headphones will soon go the way of non-smart TVs.
Is there a true app that, preferably open source, that can disable the all microphones, confidently, for all apps, without having to physically disable my microphone as Edward Snowden suggested?
Depends on the permissions model of the OS, and if you trust the OS. Hence why Edward Snowden and Bunnie Huang developed the Introspection Engine [1].
It’s reasonable to assume that if you can’t audit and review the code of the app and the OS, you can trust neither and need safeguards at lower levels of the stack.
Yes, they're called amplifiers. Directional coupling circuits would apply in theory, but not in practice; they're good enough to do full-duplex audio over two wires, but not nearly good enough to deal with the sensitivity of analog inputs if you want to prevent a signal from being read.
I first really appreciated your thought - indeed, the fact that "Headphones are collecting personal data" alone feels like something unacceptable and shocking compared to just 10 years ago.
But then I had a counter thought: You know how in the early 20th century people said the dawn of recorded music would make 'music dead'? And many other examples of new tech being hailed as dystopian / would cause the end of the world? Sometimes the fear response to newness and unfamiliarity can be a little unhelpful. I think it's our lizard brains responding there.
So I guess what I'm saying is: The fact that a new situation is so different to an old one you were used to, isn't a cogent argument against the new situation.
Some new tech is genuinely awesome, and old things are genuinely terrible, e.g. old forms of industrialisation were terribly pollutive compared to forms used today.
I'm a person who greatly values my privacy, and doesn't follow the crowd - but perhaps one needs to compare on merits alone, not on the fact that things have changed.
I certainly batted an eye. I bought my first pair of bluetooth headphones in 2012 and I am only now finding out that some require you to install an app to use. Absurd.
As with other instances of privacy overreach, this will trickle down to cheaper tech products in an even more invasive way - e.g. cheap "smart" TVs that collect everything they can.
If even the rich people can't "muster up the energy" to defend themselves from data collection, I think we're all well and truly fucked.
The only thing that annoys me about this setup is noise of the wire brushing against clothing etc. Or if you eat with them on.
With music playing the removal of external noise is enough for me. They do well enough blocking distracting noise used as simple ear plugs too. At least the ~£20 Sennheiser ones I use do.
Lack of regulation and non-existent enforcement of existing regulation.
People are used to the government being there to prevent companies from doing bad/dangerous stuff. It’s why you can buy any food at any supermarket and be reasonably confident it won’t poison you or be full of cyanide.
People expect the same when it comes to technology companies, and I once did too - I expected that big companies would’ve already got in trouble if they did something bad so it must be safe. The problem is that is far from the truth.
Isn't this really only an issue if you use the companion app? I doubt the usb-c/lightning/bluetooth headphones can exfiltrate data if you don't have the companion app installed.
Great headphones would never require an app or updating of the firmware. They should play music as engineered and intended from day one of the purchase of said heaphones, until they no longer work.
I agree they should just work but I also think their could be good cause for an update such as an improved noise cancelation software updates. I would expect that for music playback that just works always even if you decline the update.
I'm curious about the Sony App. What information does it get from the phone? The only kind of sensitive permission it asks for is location, and arguably there's a functionality related to that (change the adaptive sound reduction as a function of where you are). The other permission it asked for is Bluetooth, which I guess is expected since it uses that to talk to the headphones. It never asked for anything else.
I didn't allow it to get my location and I can still get firmware updates and can use it to confirm the codec in use (that's the main reason I have it installed).
Access to the Bluetooth service itself can cause some problems - both in user tracking (as your device notices and is noticed by other discoverable Bluetooth devices), fingerprinting, and through access to the bluetooth data channels (as mentioned in the article with the Bose Connect app)
Sony has the worst app I’ve ever seen[1], to the point where I legitimately don’t know how it passed the app store vetting process. Paragraphs of text have wrapping disabled so that the text goes off screen (important text, like the TOS!). Text which does have wrapping enabled wraps on character boundaries instead of word boundaries. Bullet-point lists don’t line up. I have no idea how they made it so bad, it feels like it must’ve taken effort to disable things which just work by default?
It also has two buttons. I really don't see the need for an app. Besides that I don't have a phone capable of running an app so that saves me from getting irritated at Sony. Again.
Because they have complex software in for bluetooth connection, noise cancellation and other behaviours like automatically switching off when taken out for example. You don't have to update it of you prefer not to.
Because we cut a corner somewhere to make a budget device and realized it was a lot more popular and now we have to patch it like if it was a fucking nuclear reactor....
why do keyboards need firmware updates and companion apps? yet, that's exactly what my razer mech KB required for me to change the slow fade in/out to just "on". Pretty ridiculous and I too uninstalled it after, but who knows if I got it all?
To work around Bluetooth bugs in newer phones/OSes that come out.
Bluetooth stacks constantly get broken with new revisions, the burden is unfortunately placed on individual device makers to update to work with whatever has broken recently.
So to each of you with the same response; You're totally ok being sold an unfinished product, paying too high of a price for it, and then having to opt into privacy violations to use a device which should have worked from day one out of the factory. Got it. Noise cancellation in headphones is a gimmick and a fad. High end studio monitors do not typically use it, and it distorts the experience. It makes sense if you're constantly packed in like a sardine on public transit or crowded spaces and you're simply trying to block out the surroundings, but may I suggest buying a real pair of headphones and carrying a pair of earplugs instead? To be very clear on my point. I see needing to update headphones and being conned into my headphones masquerading as a "smart device" equal to needing a smart toaster, or a connected can opener that some would justify should need firmware updates. It's senseless.
How's it different to any other software? Why should I be sold an 'unfinished' PC operating system that requires updates? Is that asinine?
You don't have to update any firmware if you don't want to. It doesn't mean the product is unfinished. In the past, improvements to firmware would have just been kept for the next revision of a hardware product, requiring you to pay for a whole new physical product just to get that new software.
EQ was not a feature sold to me, it's a free addon, a nice to have.
Noise cancellation is great for those of us that have to work in noisy environments, or for neurodivergent people that need a break from information overload, or for long haul flights... or any number of scenarios you have not considered, as if nothing outside your little bubble matters. And let me guess, your "sardine in public transport" remark is just rubbing in that you don't have to rely on such either, isn't it?
Besides the point that noise cancellation can be turned off at any time, I have a perfectly fine pair of ATH-M50x's for use at home.
This comments reeks of ugly elitism and a severe lack of capacity for empathy. Maybe sometimes you should just not write whatever comes to your mind.
I suspect they liked the device in the state they bought it in, and were pleased when it later got even better at no extra charge (except for installing the app).
You can still buy dumb headphones without Bluetooth or noise cancellation of you don't like smart devices.
I only installed the Bose app when I was going to be on a plane, as the app allows you to pair multiple Bose headphones to one source. Then you can watch the same movie with someone else.
Edit: Bose also had a nice big opt-out button in the app, and asks during setup.
With the app you can also change the cancellation level, they’re pretty isolated even with the feature powered off entirely but it helps out in some situations.
My Boses allow you to set the cancellation level with a button press. It cycles through three options: high, low, and off. Does the app enable more fine-grained control or something? Perhaps per-ear cancellation settings?
Apparently so. I have the QC35 II, which has a button on the left ear can. Bose calls it the Action Button, and it's used to summon Alexa/Google Assistant; but if you don't configure it to use an assistant (through the Connect app?) it will cycle through the noise cancellation level settings.
As usual, if there's no headphone jack, I won't buy that device. Privacy isn't even the deal breaker there. Latency and the ability to use my favourite set (Sennheiser HD600) are.
As one data point, the headphone jack-having iPhone would drive 26.39 mW into 33 ohms, which means that at max volume you'd be damaging your ears at a volume of around 100dB with the 300ohm impedance and 105dB/mW SPL.
So yes, the previous poster could conceivably be doing the thing that they said they were doing.
Their sensitivity is only 97dB/mW. But I think it's more complicated than that. The amplifier might be able to deliever 26mW into 33 ohms but can it deliver that into 300 ohms? It would have to be able to produce high enough voltages. Also the impedance goes up to almost 600 ohms at the resonant frequency of the headphones, requiring even more voltage [1]. You'd obviously get some sound and it would probably even be loud enough, but there would likely be a significant effect on the frequency response and possibly more distortion that you'd like.
When at my desk, I plug in through a Mont Blanc FiiO for my Beyerdynamic headphones. Makes a big difference with some audio. Wireless buds are obviously already a step down from wired, and one step further from amplified cans. And yeah, I'm an outlier and want to be.
But there are combined DAC/amps that will use lightning connectors, so if you use an external amp, you might as well use an external dac/amp instead and get audio quality that is certainly no worse than a random android phone, and possibly better.
When the volume is set quite high (near max setting of the phone, definitely unhealthy for long-term use), it doesn't hold a candle to the Topping DX3 Pro v1[0] I use on my desktop. Important: I don't recommend the v2[1] that's currently on sale, as the measurements aren't anywhere as good. They did destroy the product with the amp redesign they did to get around a high early failure rate hardware problem on the v1 that they were never able to debug. I would suggest the JDS Atom + Atom DAC set or the Topping DX7 Pro instead, cheap (yet powerful well measuring) and expensive (but balanced and ridiculously well measuring) respectively. Or a Schiit Hel for a very portable usb-powered solution for the laptop backpack that also has mic input.
But at lowish volumes (used most of the time, don't destroy your ears!) then yes, phones tend to have reasonable headphone amps in them. With decent power output and lowish output impedance. Unlike most computer motherboards, which have excessive output impedance and out power is so low I'd call anemic, when not flawed in other ways (noise due to poor isolation, or non-flat frequency reproduction due to shit implementations of aliasing filters).
I mostly connect the headphones to the phone to play rhythm games like Love Live sif, allstars or idolm@ster deresute, mirishita. My phone (chinese and a few years old) does very successfully drive the HD600 to a pleasant output while playing these games.
As an aside, I absolutely recommend Sennheiser HD600 to anyone who wants a durable (plus tool-free modular with good availability of parts, and compatibility with HD580/58x/650(aka 6xx),660S parts, thus effectively forever) all-rounder open back headphone with a focus on accuracy that's cost efficient and extremely comfortable. Plus they've been around for a good two decades, thus there's no shortage of reviews to base a purchase decision on.
It’s still kicking around, still works, but I switched to easy to drive IEMs for on the go listening so my biggest problem these days is getting the volume quiet enough.
I felt cheated after falling for the mass hysteria, which lead me to acquire my first set of SR-60. It didn't take very long to realise how uncomfortable they are for longer listening periods, or when the cable turns into a tangled mess, and the special hell, when you have to replace the earpads.
There were two things that happened when Apple got rid of the headphone jack: (1) they added water resistance, (2) the phones got thinner. Plus, Apple had seen the trends heading toward wireless headphones.
They still included a dongle to give you a standard headphone jack.
While Apple could likely have gotten their water resistance even with the headphone jack, they couldn’t have made the phones as thin. People may disagree with the product choice, but I don’t see any reason to think that those weren’t the real reasons.
> While Apple could likely have gotten their water resistance even with the headphone jack, they couldn’t have made the phones as thin.
Except that's a pretty obvious lie. Not just that the phones did not get thinner (or lighter), they stayed around the same thickness (+- 0.5 mm), while getting larger, much heavier and much more expensive. But also the thinnest Android phone with a 3.5 mm jack is just 5.1 mm thick, for example. Sony even made a waterproof phone that's 6.5 mm thin and still has a 3.5 mm jack, which is thinner than any iPhone ever.
Everything about this argumentation is wrong or an outright lie. The only reason they did this is because they could moneygrab through accessoires better when they eliminate standardized I/O.
The explanation/excuse I recall seeing, was about space, not thickness. The headphone jack takes up space inside the phone that they’d rather put to other uses, like more battery for example. At least, that seems to make a bit more sense.
Yes it does. I think back then teardown pictures made the rounds where the innards of the two generations where virtually the same, except they added some component where the headphone jack used to be. And as far as smartphone components go, a 3.5 mm jack is pretty big; I'd guess about the volume of a camera module.
I don't know who started the thinness-jack meme, I suspect it was an explanation made up by people other than Apple, since Apple is usually more into omitting things instead of lying.
It would be very straightforward as well to simply come up with a new thinner analog headphone jack: maybe something balanced and with a magnetic connector since we’re at it?
Despite being aware of this, you went on to create a posting that's largely assumptions, projections and some salty ad-hominem.
> Sorry you haven’t been able to cope with, really, such a trivial change in 5 years.
I haven't upgraded my phone in a number of years, so it actually still has a headphone jack, which I virtually never use since I don't listen to music on the go.
Does anybody other than PR/marketing people care about phones being thinner than they are? It's just an excuse to not give better battery life which costs money.
They "had seen the trends heading toward wireless headphones" or they wanted to create the trend and sell their own headphones? The second explanation seems much better.
Yeah, because some asshole business team decided that why should anyone sell a decent product anymore, when you can squeeze your customers for their personal information, and have a recurring/ongoing revenue stream?
It's like these shit-tier blogs and webdevs, who are tracking every single thing you do on their sites. Are they just incapable of creating? all this tracking...it's anti-creative in the extreme. Mechanical, soulless, lowest common denominator. It's medium.com and web 3.0. Where's the exit bros?
Pedometers have been a thing for quite some time. It was about 20 years ago when one of my parents bought a pedometer, it didn’t have an app, but it had an lcd display that told you how many steps you took.
While I agree in principle, this kind of observation is getting awfully close to mister gotcha[1]. Whenever the topic of, for example, google analytics comes up on HN, many reasons are given for why the alternatives are inferior. And that's from people intimately familiar with the tech. I'm not sure how you can expect a site whose revenue probably comes exclusively from Google ads to be able to effectively resist the Google/Facebook duopoly.
I've seen this comment or a variation on it a thousand times now and it is getting boring. Just like all the other times: please comment on the message rather than on the means of delivery, finding pages without social media embeds is becoming more and more rare and besides that the party writing the article content may not have control over that particular aspect. But that doesn't mean they don't have a point.
They author may not be able to control the social media embeds of this particular site, but they certainly have control over where the choose to publish. I see nothing wrong with taking them to task for this sort of hypocrisy.
No, they don't always have that control. Maybe in this case they do, maybe they don't. But your typical author is in someone's pay. And they probably don't have the pick of where to publish besides the bulk of the places where you can work and write articles that reach a sizeable audience will have this kind of environment.
Anyway, seeing the same comment over and over again reduces its value. It was a cool observation the first time, boring the second, redundant after that.
There is no value in calling out hypocrisy. If a murderer outs another murderer now you know about two murderers. Saying "you're a murderer too, you hypocrite" has no epistemological value.
They've got a few settings that are software controlled (one being the bluetooth's internal volume) What happens if you get a software update and you open the app on a plane without wifi? You can't use it because it requires the internet to get the latest _required tos_ to use your headphones. You can't proceed further without being forced into an agreement. Clicking "don't accept" pushes you back to the tos screen.