Avenging a One-Star Review With Digital Sabotage
A dispute over a garage-door opener shows just how much control manufacturers have over your internet-connected things.
On Saturday, an unhappy customer vented online about an internet-connected garage-door opener he’d bought on Amazon. It was the sort of short, unremarkable comment that’s left thousands upon thousands of times a day by disgruntled shoppers who can’t get the gizmos they just brought home to work.
The device, Garadget, connects to existing garage-door hardware. It lets users remotely open and close their garage door from a smartphone, and alerts them whenever the garage is accessed.
“iPhone App will not stay open,” Robert Martin (username: rdmart7) on Garadget’s official discussion board. “Wondering what kind of piece of shit I just purchased here…” For good there. “Junk - DO NOT WASTE YOUR MONEY.”
