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.
