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222118 Directory Enquiry Numbers as Paid Customer Service Intermediaries (Germany) is a practice in which businesses allow premium-rate 118 operators to advertise themselves as a way to reach their…
Around mid-December in 2020, several hacker groups going by the names FIN11, UNC2546, and CLOP, infiltrated Kiteworks (formerly Accellion) systems using SQL injection, affecting organizations…
Adobe is a software company based in San Jose, California, that specializes in creative software, including photo editing, video editing, animation, illustration, web development, and more. Founded…
Starting in 2013, Adobe has been replacing its perpetually licensed products with subscription based services, examples being Adobe Creative Suite (CS) in 2013, and Adobe Lightroom 7 standalone in…
Advertising overload refers to the practice of not only integrating advertising as a source of revenue in software and websites, but also increasing the number of ads within platforms that consumers…
AirAsia is a budget airline based in Malaysia. In 2007, The New York Times described AirAsia as a pioneer of low-cost travel in Asia. As of November 2025, they serve Asia, the Middle East, and…
AirPods are wireless earbuds designed by Apple. They first debuted on 7 September 2016, alongside the iPhone 7, and were released on 13 December 2016.
Airthings ASA sells air monitors and purifiers, which customers can pair with a mobile app in order to access the air measurements and various additional services. On May 21, 2024, they sent an…
Alliance Laundry Systems and Speed Queen, a US-based company and subsidiary with systems rolling out across both north and south America has created an exploitative system with negative implications…
Allstate, founded in 1931, is an American insurance provider that also operates in Canada. The company owns several subsidiaries, many of which carry the Allstate name, as well as Esurance. It is one…
Ally Invest Securities, LLC (also known as Ally Invest) is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Ally Financial which provides securities brokerage and financial services. Ally Invest provides services to…
Sellers on Amazon can list products, gather reviews for them, and then modify the listings to sell entirely different items while retaining the reviews from the previously sold products…
Amazon Kindle is a product line of e-readers made by Amazon.
Ancestry.com, owned by The Blackstone Group, is a genealogy company based in the US, known for its DNA testing and family trees.
Android is an operating system which started in 2003 and was acquired by Google in 2005, which made its first official release (Android 1.0) in 2008. It is based on a modified version of the Linux…
On August 25, 2025, Google announced an upcoming application installation restriction on Google-certified Android devices, requiring all developers to register and verify their real-life identity…
Anthropic PBC is a private for-profit American artificial intelligence (AI) startup founded in 2021. Anthropic is mainly known for their family of large language models (LLMs) known as Claude.
Anti-Cheat Expert commonly abbreviated as "ACE" is an modular anti-cheat system developed by Tencent, that initially released in 2005 as a anti-bot solution for Free Fantasy Online. ACE provides…
Anti-privacy legislation simply put is a legislation that may be created with malicious intent or not that invoke ones right to privacy. More recently, governments across the world have introduced…
Anti-rollback, or ARB, for device firmware is a feature of some devices that prevents the device from booting if it detects that the device has been downgraded to an older, unapproved software build…
Apple is an American technology company that was founded in 1976 by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne. It is best known for its consumer electronics, software, and services. Apple's current…
Apple uses a range of technical measures to maintain control over the App Store ecosystem. While Apple cites security and user-friendliness as the reasoning behind these measures, they often create…
The Apple Authorized Service Provider Program is a program created by Apple that attempts to provide third party authorized repair technicians with sufficient resources to repair Apple products.
iOS, the operating system of the Apple iPhone, has introduced on its Beta version 26.4 an integrated Age Verification in the operating system. This feature will be launched on the United Kingdom…
AI training is a process by which data is fed into an AI model, in order to adjust its weights. This makes the output of the model closely match that of its input.
ASUS customers reported rejections of their repairs by what the manufacturer calls "Customer Induced Damage". Customers say that the reasons given or damages listed were wrong, and that the repairs…
Audi equips all vehicles with the optional tri-zone climate control feature with the necessary hardware. Customers who do not purchase the option at the time of sale still receive the hardware, but…
Autodesk, Inc. is an American software company headquartered in San Francisco, California, that provides software products and services for the architecture, engineering, construction, manufacturing…
Axon Enterprise, Inc. (formerly TASER International) is a Scottsdale, Arizona-based public "safety" technology company founded in 1993 by Rick Smith and Tom Smith. Axon develops and sells Tasers…
Balena (formerly known as Resin.io) provides a platform focused on DevOps management for servers, clients, and local cross platform device software. It also offers tools for updating, deploying and…
The Bambu Lab A1 NTC thermistor fire and meltdown hazard is an ongoing product-safety defect in which the negative-temperature-coefficient thermistor on the AC distribution board of older Bambu Lab…
On January 16, 2025, the 3D-printer manufacturer Bambu Lab announced that future firmwares for its 3D printers would introduce an authorization and authentication mechanism for printer connection and…
In April 2026, Bambu Lab sent a private cease-and-desist demand to Paweł Jarczak, the Polish maintainer of an AGPL-licensed OrcaSlicer community fork that had restored direct printer control…
Bloatware can be defined in two main classes: Pre-installed or bundled: Features not required by a system (physical or digital) to work properly, and/or undesirable programs. Software that has…
The bootloader is a special program on a device that loads the operating system when the device is turned on. Bootloaders are typically set by the manufacturer and shipped to retailers and consumers…
Robert Bosch GmbH, commonly known as Bosch (styled BOSCH), is a German multinational engineering and technology company founded in 1886 by Robert Bosch.
In October 2025, Bose Corporation announced that it would end cloud support for its entire SoundTouch product line on February 18, 2026. The decision sparked widespread consumer backlash, as owners…
Brainly (originally Zadane.pl) is a Polish company and platform founded in 2009 by Michał Borkowski dedicated towards students assisting each other for homework online. In recent years, the platform…
Brother Industries Ltd. manufactures and sells communications and printing equipment in Japan, the Americas, Europe, Asia, Oceania, the Middle East, Africa, and internationally. It operates through…
Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) is a financing option for online purchases that allows consumers to pay for items in four installments. Companies such as Klarna, Affirm, PayPal, and Apple Pay offer Buy…
Internet access is a monthly subscription to access a physical infrastructure. Modern internet connections use cable such a COAX or fiber optics to deliver TV and internet to homes across Canada…
About a year after Canva acquired Serif, and along with it, the Affinity range of graphic editing applications, it removed the ability for users to purchase older versions of the Affinity software…
CFMOTO changed the terms of service for the CFMOTO Ride mobile application by introducing a paid subscription model for its intelligent services. These changes, implemented on 15 August 2025…
ChatGPT (Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer) is a generative artificial intelligence application developed and marketed by OpenAI. It was released on November 30th, 2022. It is a large language…
ChatGPT-4o was a language model that belonged to the ChatGPT family, that became controversial due to safety problems, AI psychosis and attempts to remove it from OpenAI's platform.
Cisco Systems, Inc. is an American multinational corporation that develops, manufactures, and sells networking hardware, software, telecommunications equipment and other high-technology services and…
Claude is a generative artificial intelligence, a large language model (LLM) developed and released by Anthropic. It was created with the objective of being a safe AI for the public. Claude family…
Clearview AI, Inc. is an American facial recognition company, providing software to law enforcement, government agencies, and (previously) private companies. The Artificial intelligence (AI)-software…
Clip Studio Paint switched from a perpetual license to a subscription model. They had given users with a perpetual license free feature updates, but stopped after changes to the business model. When…
In August 2025, YouTuber Louis Rossmann started a grassroots solidarity visibility campaign (tentatively named the Clippy Campaign), wherein participants changed their profile pictures on social…
In consumer technology, a cloud service typically refers to a data processing service provided by a service provider (often product manufacturer), often for a periodic fee, without control over or…
Coffee Meets Bagel is a dating and social-networking service based in the United States, founded in 2012 by three sisters.
Collective Shout is an Australian activist group founded in 2009 by its current director, Melinda Tankard Reist. It identifies itself as: "A grassroots movement challenging the objectification of…
The Consumer Technology Association (or CTA) is both a standards and trade organization. Their mission statement is "to help innovators of all sizes grow their business." They are active lobbyists…
CosmosDirekt is an insurance group based in Saarbrücken, Germany.
Cox Communications, Inc. is an Atlanta-based American telecommunications company which provides internet, TV, home automation, and phone services. It operates in 18 states, providing service to…
Creality is a Chinese technology company headquartered in Shenzhen which manufactures 3D printers and 3D scanners
A dark pattern is an umbrella term for all deceptive tricks faced by consumers, and it relies on behavioral psychology and human biases in order to make the user act against their own intent, like…
Denuvo Software Solutions GmbH is an Austrian company that develops the digital-rights management (DRM) and anti-tamper software Denuvo Anti-Tamper (DAT) and the anti-cheat system Denuvo Anti-Cheat…
DeviantArt is an art sharing platform that was launched on August 7th, 2000 by Mathew Stephens, Scott Jarkoff and Angelo Sotira, among others.
Digital rights management (DRM), alternatively known as digital restrictions management, broadly refers to any kind of access control technology that is used to deliberately restrict the usage of…
DJI is a Chinese drone and camera manufacturer that requires mandatory app activation on its consumer products, locks cameras and gimbals into non-functional states after 5 activation skips, and…
Duolingo is a publicly owned, American language-learning website founded in 2011 by Luis von Ahn and Severin Hacker. On July 28, 2021, the company began trading on the Nasdaq Global Select Market. As…
Duracell Energy EV Charger is used to charge your electric vehicles at home. This requires installation of a charging point. To use the charger, you must install their phone app or use their provided…
Electronic Arts (colloquially shortened to EA) is a former video-game developer and now publisher founded in 1982 by Trip Hawkins. It is well known for its simulator titles under the Sim series (The…
Sensi Smart Thermostat (tested with st55u) can only be used with the app if you give your information such as location and phone, and enable internet to the product.
Empatica E4 was a medical-grade wristband developed by Empatica Inc. for clinical and academic research released in 2015. The device contains four primary sensors from which physiological data is…
Platform decay, commonly known as Enshittification or crapification, is a practice in which companies (usually large ones) allow the quality of the products or services they provide to decline over…
The European Union (EU) is a political and economic union of 27 member states that are located primarily in Europe. Article 169 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union enables the EU…
FiiO Electronics Technology Company, Ltd., or simply FiiO, is a Chinese electronics company founded in 2007 that primarily manufactures audio equipment. Its products include portable music players…
Firefox is a free and open-source web browser developed by the Mozilla Foundation. It is officially available on Windows (10 and above), macOS and Linux.
Flashforge (legal name: Zhejiang Flashforge 3D Technology Co., Ltd.) is a Chinese desktop & industrial 3D printer manufacturer founded in 2011. Between February 2025 and May 2026, Flashforge…
Forced account registration/sign-in/log-in is a practice committed by entities, where users must have (and use) a digital identity to perform simple tasks that may have otherwise been possible…
Forced app download is a practice committed by businesses and government entities where users must download an app on their smartphones to perform simple tasks that may have otherwise been possible…
Forced cloud, forced internet, forced remote connection, etc... is a practice in which software or hardware requires a continuous/constant (or, at least, regular) device connection to remote servers…
Forced Identification is the practice of forcing the user to unnecessarily provide their ID in order to access a product or service. The primary concern for forced identification comes from how…