Your car emits tons of data and there’s a fight over who gets it! Phones remain challenging to repair for a variety of software and hardware reasons! The Green Party presents an idea that is both visionary and rooted in precedent! Exclamation points!!!
Right to Repair: Do You Know Where Your Data Is?
Massachusetts, which demonstrated a groundswell for passing Right to Repair legislation in 2012, is petitioning to guarantee a vote on an update to the law in 2020. The proposed change would incorporate advanced electronic and IoT components of vehicles into the same access agreements that the first bill applied to service manuals and spare parts.
These “smart” components – increasingly present in consumer goods, from our phones and cars to our printers and refrigerators – are designed to transmit real-time data (including repair diagnostics) wirelessly to manufacturers. They can also bear particular constraints of software and digital rights management that make seeking independent repair a challenge, leaving the ultimate control of servicing these parts in the hands of original equipment manufacturers (OEMs).
Nebraska is in stride with Massachusetts on this issue; its Farm Bureau voted 176-1 to endorse Right to Repair for Nebraskan farming families. Farmers have intimate knowledge of butting against digital constraints of their farm equipment, and have gone to such lengths as hiring hackers to circumnavigate OEM software locks –which would otherwise require visiting a dealership for repair – to keep their equipment working.
Ironically, “strangers, hackers, and criminals” are precisely what consumers have to fear from Right to Repair legislation – at least, according to one coalition that was formed in opposition to the ballot proposal. This explicitly boogeyman-esque language is intended to frighten voters away from allowing broader access to data, such as speed and location, that could be used against them for nefarious purposes of “advertising” and “stalking.” As it stands, automotive OEMs seem to be developing unilateral cybersecurity measures for vehicle-generated data, presumably to gatekeep it themselves.
The Phone Report: Form/Function/Security/Design
Elsewhere in digital privacy news: the software component “Activation Lock” is making otherwise functional iPhones obsolete in the name of device security. Disposed devices that have not been factory reset by their owner cannot be refurbished for another use; instead, phone recyclers must resort to scrapping or shredding the devices.
Until a world where Apple grants reset access to refurbishers and recyclers, or one where all people magically remember to FACTORY 🔊RESET 🔊 BEFORE 🔊DISPOSAL, the next best solution to putting a dent in the tide of e-waste generated by these security measures would be designing a phone to neatly part out in the first place for maximum re-use of its constituent parts. If only precedent for such a modular phone existed…. Oh wait, it does, it’s called the Fairphone, and its design is rated 10/10 repairable by iFixit. However, the features of the Fairphone can be viewed as lacking compared to competitors – an important design consideration to remember in a consumer landscape where not everyone’s purchasing values are rooted in repairability.
great, let’s start with the right to repair
— Milan (social.tchncs.de/@milan) (@milan_ihl) August 6, 2019
As regular readers of our repair roundups know, using electronics (or really, any possessions) at their highest level of function is the most environmentally conscious choice consumers can make. When manufacturers inhibit our options to use our stuff for longer, it is in direct conflict with sustainability objectives, no matter how much lip service their CEOs pay to the urgency of climate change. (And if shaming OEMs in op-eds feels futile, there’s always class-action lawsuits to hold them to a higher standard.)
Politics Corner: Seeing Green
Repair cafes – fun, free events where volunteers will fix broken items at no charge – have for years been the modus operandi of people perturbed by the disposability of modern consumer goods. Now, in the UK, Greens are making repair cafes part of the official party line. Moving the issue of a “throwaway economy” into the legislative sphere, the Green Party has issued a platform decree that calls for broader access to repair and legislation that would require actual shifts in industrial design, moving the needle toward repairability. As with most Green Party principles, my personal read would tend to waver between the optimism of “great idea!” and the pessimism of “never gonna happen” – and yet, with EU precedent for legislation requiring repairable design, this idea seems almost, refreshingly, mainstream.