I want to be left alone (2024)

You're acting like this is related to necessary maintenance / safety, why give corporate the benefit of the doubt without knowing about the vehicle involved?

Even things like washing machines and coffee makers will soft-brick themselves these days asking you to "start self clean-cycle with Foo(tm) substance" and then won't perform their function without some kind of forced reset. That part of the airplane ride where the PA is blasting some kind of "join our miles club" literally at a captive audience with no choice but to listen? It's not safety related either. My headphones that I would like to use to drown out the PA advertisement literally stop working if they detect speech, and the only way to disable this "feature" is to download their app.

This is just growth-hacking "zero-cost advertisements to a targeted audience" stuff that's extremely disrespectful at best, and kinda looks like it's edging closer to threats and extortion.

> You're acting like this is related to necessary maintenance / safety,

It's the maintenance reminder notification on a couple ton metal machine with lots of critical moving parts meant to operate next to pedestrians, cyclists, and other vehicles in public spaces. The maintenance schedule usually is related to safety and good operating of the car over time. Things wear out and should be inspected, serviced, and replaced over time. Should I just be OK with people ignoring the maintenance schedule? Should I be OK with the airline ignoring routine maintenance as well? The transit operator ignoring the maintenance on their trains?

I don't think it's unreasonable to require people to keep to maintenance schedules if they want to operate such machines in public spaces. It's a mistake for these states to relax inspection requirements. I don't mind a notification bugging an owner refusing to do the maintenance on their car. It probably pushed a lot of people to do it who would have otherwise forgotten.

What? I'm not arguing that people have the right to ignore important safety-related notices, especially if it's related to public safety.

I'm arguing that we should have the right to reliably separated channels for safety/operational notifications vs commercial content / outright scams. We don't have that though, which effectively erodes the safety you are saying you want to protect. If you're serious about safety, you should agree that using airplane PAs for emergencies instead of ads is a good idea. You should also be onboard with the idea that "service required" should actually mean "service required", not just that it's time to pay what amounts to a subscription fee to the vendor. Once a signal has degraded into pure noise, people get used to ignoring it.

The situation is mostly the same with software updates.. no way for end-users to reliably separate updates that help them vs ones that are only going to hurt them. Serious about security? Don't get too comfortable blasting your users with immaterial "news and updates" trash, or of course they want to ignore you

Once again, the person I was replying to was talking about the maintenance notification on their car. Not some ad for satellite radio or some other thing, a maintenance notification. It's scheduled to go off at the scheduled maintenance interval. It's not an ad. Any knowledgeable individual can clear it if they did their maintenance by the book. It's a reminder to go look at the book and do the scheduled maintenance or pay someone else to do it for you, whether that be the dealer or any other knowledgeable shop. Having it continue to go off indicates one didn't bother doing the scheduled maintenance on it. They're continuing to operate their car probably in public spaces while ignoring the maintenance.