*in the USA. This doesn’t apply to EU and UK as per the article
The fact that the US allows companies to flat out steal your device during a repair process is insane. This is theft. Actual straight up theft.
Surely this doesn’t even need any new laws - I’m pretty sure theft is already illegal
The fact that the US allows companies to flat out steal your device during a repair process is insane.
The US doesn’t allow it. Google won’t keep your phone; they’ll just refuse to service it. They had that line in their TOS for their own protection for weird scenarios, but they’re not going to keep your phone. Why would they? It’s broken and full of parts they can’t use; they’re not going to just let it occupy space in their warehouse, they’ll send it back.
This whole thing is an absurd overreaction to a poorly-written line in a TOS that has never even been enforced.
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You’re asking me to prove a negative?
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How is this not a theft? There can’t be any policy like that holding up at court.
In Soviet America only YOU steal from corporation
Short of a class action, no one can afford to take them to court and they know it. Bullies be bullying.
If you stole a phone from a Google office, they would call the police and you go to jail. If Google steals your phone, you can try to sue them. The system working as intented, keeping us lowly plebs in our place.
Small claims court? At least if you lose the case you’ll know it ended up costing them 10x what the phone cost you.
Though forced arbitration is probably in there somewhere
I need forced arbitration to be federally unenforceable.
This is just flatout theft. This is stealing of customer property. Incredible.
They just revised the policy to address the criticism.
Classic cropo response: No no no. You just misunderstand it. This is what we ment actually.
They “clarifiy” it just because someone found out those shitty terms.
“We’re sorry we got caught.”
Caught? Like if I get caught putting a giant spoiler on my Cadillac? Sure it should be a crime but it’s not. I did it in my front yard and it took 6 weeks to finish installing and painting it and all my neighbors saw me do it, and I’m here telling you about it. There’s no caught because it was my Cadillac, my spoiler, and my own bad taste.
Steal. Might steal. If you’re going to write an article as a journalist, have some guts and write the truth.
In another example of how our pay-to-play society privileges the extremely wealthy, they won’t say things like that because they could get sued for it, and even though it’s a totally accurate description of the behaviour, they might not be able to survive the process of being sued, whereas Google would just use the lawyers they keep on retainer as part of their cost of doing business.
More than likely the reason for this is because they are not sending the original device back.
They are probably pulling a used one that is in good shape from the shelf that is the same style, etc - shipping it to you as the replacement in order to save time and sending yours back to a repair center to be worked on if possible.
Or just junking it out right.
Which doesn’t make it okay, of course.
They should either disclose longer turnaround times for people in those situations, charge (after authorization) for a non-warranty repair, or send the device back unrepairable if that’s the case (which they do in some regions).
Why should they do that? If they decide it’s a better use of their resources to swap the entire device than to repair the original and ship it back, why would you be opposed to that? You’re getting an entire new device out of the deal and coming out ahead with new hardware (and possibly upgraded hardware, if there have been manufacturing revisions since your original purchase).
If it’s a matter of your data, it should always be assumed that you will lose 100% of your data when you send a device in for repair, no matter what the repair is. There’s always a chance that they need to replace a component containing the storage, that your device has to be reset to defaults after a part has been replaced anyway, or that it just straight-up gets physically lost in the mail. Backup before sending in anything for repairs. Why anybody would put an un-wiped phone in the mail in the first place, is beyond me.
Isn’t the idea that they’d say “Sorry, your device isn’t supported for our repairs, and we’re unable to send anything back to you”? So the user gets nothing?
That’s what Rossman would like you to believe, but that’s not what actually happens. They send it back to you.
