My neighbor Carol came over last week with a folder of invoices she needed to scan. She has one of those HP multifunction printers — the kind that sits on a desk and costs about the same as a decent vacuum cleaner. She'd already printed the pages. She just needed to scan them back in as PDFs. Simple job. Ten minutes, tops.
Forty-five minutes later she was at my kitchen table reading the HP Smart app's account creation screen out loud with a look I can only describe as "filing cabinet rage."
HP pushed a mandatory update to its Smart app that now requires users to create an online account and stay connected to the internet, even when scanning over a direct USB cable. Local scanning. Wire in the back of the machine, wire in the front of the computer, no network involved. Except now, apparently, HP needs to know who you are first.
Carol's printer refused the job entirely until she logged in.
I'm pretty sure I own my printer. I have a receipt. But somewhere between the purchase and this October update, the working arrangement seems to have changed without anyone asking me about it. The printer still sits on my desk. I just apparently rent the scanning function now, with HP holding the key.
This is the same company that made headlines for bricking third-party ink cartridges through a firmware update, which later triggered a class-action lawsuit. The pattern here isn't subtle. Each update quietly narrows what you can do with hardware you've already paid for, and widens the channel through which HP can see you using it.
The practical damage here is real and unglamorous. Small business owners scanning receipts, freelancers handling contracts, older adults who set up their printers once and want them to just work — they're the ones sitting there reading error messages at inconvenient times. Carol scans invoices for her small alterations shop. She's not running a server farm. She needed to email a PDF to her accountant before end of business.
There's a specific kind of frustration that comes from a piece of hardware you own deciding to become something you manage. Printers used to be stupid. Wonderfully stupid. You hit print, or you hit scan, and the machine complied. No portal. No credentials. No cloud handshake. The worst thing that could happen was a paper jam.
I'm not against software updates in principle. Security patches exist for good reasons. But requiring an active internet connection to scan a piece of paper over a USB cable is not a security measure. It's a data collection mechanism wearing a security measure's coat.
The right to repair conversation usually focuses on physical parts — batteries, screens, replacement chips. But there's a software version of the same problem growing quietly in home offices everywhere. Your device works until an update decides it doesn't. And the update is mandatory.
Carol ended up photographing her invoices with her phone and emailing those instead. Which, fine. It worked. But she spent an hour of a Tuesday morning fighting her printer just to skip it entirely.
Have you had a printer, appliance, or other hardware stop working the way it used to after a software update? What happened?
Comments