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Charles Henderson sold his car several years ago, but he still knows exactly where it is, and can control it from his phone.
[...] Manufacturers create apps to control smart cars — you can use your phone to unlock the car, honk the horn and find out the exact location of your vehicle. Henderson removed his personal information from services in the car before selling it back to the dealership, but he was still able to control the car through a mobile app for years.
That's because only the dealership that originally sold the car can see who has access and manually remove someone from the app. A full factory reset of the vehicle doesn't revoke mobile access, Henderson said. In order to revoke app access, you should go to a factory-authorized car dealership.
On smartphones, a factory reset wipes all the local data off the device so you can sell it to someone else. So-called internet of things devices store information in servers far away from the actual hardware. This means executing a factory reset on your car only resets the car — the data still exists in the cloud for other people to access.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Monday February 20 2017, @07:14PM
"Your" can both signify possession ("your money") and association ("your partner"). Maybe if the language were more precise in this regard, companies would have a much harder time playing games with ownership vs. licensing.
Does anyone know a language that distinguishes both "your"s?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 4, Informative) by AthanasiusKircher on Monday February 20 2017, @09:29PM
"Your" can both signify possession ("your money") and association ("your partner"). Maybe if the language were more precise in this regard, companies would have a much harder time playing games with ownership vs. licensing.
I'm not sure precisely what grammatical distinction you're getting at. Generally speaking, both categories are typically covered in most languages by a genitive case [wikipedia.org], which typically has a bunch of different linguistic functions (as you can read about in the intro to that link). But the possession distinction brought up by things like "your partner" is actually more of an alienable vs. inalienable [wikipedia.org] possession distinction. That is, "partner" is an inalienable possession dictated by the relationship implied in the definition of the word, kind of like "father" or "neighbor."
There are languages that make distinctions between inalienable vs. alienable possession, but I'm not sure that actually addresses what you're getting at in terms of ownership vs. licensing, which has a legal context rather than simply a matter of grammar. Basically, it sounds like you want to distinguish between whether a possession is effectively "owned" vs. "rented" through grammar. Except that distinction depends a lot on the specific cultural and legal context. There are some languages that make a distinction of relatedness through the relative position of the pronoun (e.g., "your boat" vs. "boat of [belonging to] you") and sometimes grammatical form -- and sometimes that has to do with the degree or type of association between two things.
But I don't know any language that differentiates permanent vs. temporary "ownership" in the legalistic way you seem to desire. Probably because the idea of "rental" or "licensed" property only tends to make sense in a developed legalistic culture which is likely to have a more stable language with a relatively standard grammar. Cultures in transition enough to have wildly shifting grammar probably aren't as likely to make such distinctions -- either you own something or you don't... and if somebody else wants it tomorrow, they beat you over the head and take it.