So appently GE Fridges will now use DRM (Digital “Rights” Managment) to lock their customers into buying their cartidges.
Also it will completely disable the Water dispenser if they do not buy new GE filters.
This seems pretty Shonky. Like John Deer tractors, Keurig machines and Printer Cartidges. Companies are gonna keep pushing technology solely to control customers into spending more money with 1 company. This needs more attention I think.
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Welcome to the community Triss!
I’d certainly group this in with the printer cartridge saga, specifically HP, however the alarming thing is that as I understand it, HP were taken to task for changing functionality after the printer was purchased (through updates) without giving the customer notification and an option - and not identifying the restriction on printer cartridges prior to sale, especially when customers identified they would be using third party cartridges. More here …
So it doesn’t seem the act of doing it is illegal, just the act of misrepresenting whether it is done? … and all in the name of protecting the customer’s user experience by preventing them from using ‘inferior products’ - an attitude that one could suggest seems a little arrogant with the likes of GE …
Maybe we are entering the age of ‘FaaS’ (Fridge as a Service) …
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A salient point in the referenced web report is
UPDATE:After this article has made it around a couple people let me know that the fridge would, in fact, continue to work just would roll over to a days-past mode. That said I can now buy 15$ filters on Amazon vs 50$ DRM filters. Oh and no more triangle of doom on my fridge HMI)
However the concept of DRM in consumables should be interesting for Choice in its ongoing work.
I refused to buy anything Sony for nearly 2 decades because of their stewardship of region encoding DVDs before I rolled over. Sony is still on my list of ‘only when buying another brand will affect me negatively in comparison’. Many of our vehicles also have maintenance counters warning the annuals service is due, but how to reset the ‘valuable information’ is easy to find and all shops have it, and ignoring it will not disable the vehicle just cause nagware messages.
It seems the idea may be getting pervasive in business attempts to sell us more and control their products we buy. Note to self, no GE products for us!
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It’s not even remotely a stretch to imagine the various consumables on vehicles having rfid tags for expiry/etc - the various filters (fuel, oil, a/c) and then whinging about non-genuine if you replace them with a Ryco/Repco/etc.
The misrepresentation of the problem is part of the issue. The assertion that only the manufacturer is capable of making a consumable or part that is up to scratch is one side of that (my printer for example)
… the other being the device misleading the customer as to the problem - like when I tried to scan a banknote a while back to find the spelling error (scan in hi-res and view on screen - I think it was the new 50) - printer said:
“Copier Error” indeed - sounded a bit vague. What it really meant was “I refuse to scan banknotes because my manufacturer and the government have quietly conspired to not allow this while giving me a vague/misleading error message” … now it is fairly well known that counterfeiting bank notes is illegal and probably anything to do with attempting to image anything remotely banknote-ish blah blah blah, but call it how it is - if I buy a product that refuses to perform an action ‘by design’ it should be noted in the documentation and the error message should not obfuscate the reality. My printer user manual just says it is illegal and don’t do it - another model from Fuji says:
… which is more like it - and one hopes the error message is also more relevant. Eurion/Omron will stop you and our yellow dots with identify you … We digress a little, but not really.
The crossover here is with connectivity and identification, correlation of who is doing what, with what, to what, is potentially very invasive. Even if information is not transmitted remotely, products can and do store a history of events - how they are used and what consumables have been used etc.
Imagine a fridge that announces “Farmers Union Iced Coffee cools better in my space, no guarantees with the ‘Big M’ you are waving around …” … or do they already do that?
There is a much bigger topic here 
Same.
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