Google Allows Creditors to Brick Your Phone - eviltoast

I installed NetGuard about a month ago and blocked all internet to apps, unless they’re on a whitelist. No notifications from this particular system app (that can’t be disabled) until recently when it started making internet connection requests to google servers. Does anyone know when this became a thing?

Were the courts not enough control for creditors? Since when are they allowed to lock you out of your purchased property without a court order?

I don’t even live in the US, so what the actual fuck?

  • Max-P@lemmy.max-p.me
    6·
    8 months ago

    That is both Google’s official version and what it looks like poking at it.

    I haven’t dug in the code, so I don’t know if this is theoretically possible for a shady carrier to enable after the fact. But it very much looks like a dormant feature nobody uses.

    I guess I could see that making sense in poorer countries where carriers might have issues of people signing up for phone plans and never paying. A carrier locked flip phone was pretty useless, but nowadays cutting your phone/data off is more of an inconvenience than a dealbreaker, you’ve still got WiFi and a nice phone.