All your points are sound. The issue that I have with this is that remote disable functionality is not necessary to achieve any of these aims. Before they were connected to the internet, people were still able to rent/lease autos and the world managed to survive just fine. There were other ways for lenders to get remunerated for breaking lease terms - they could issue an additional charge, get a court order for repossession, etc. Remote disable was never needed or warranted.

So let’s start by considering the due process here. Before, there was some sort of process involved in the repossession act. With remote disable however, the lender can act as judge, jury and executioner so to speak - that party can unilaterally disable the device with no oversight. And if the lender is in the wrong, there is likely no recourse. Another potential issue here is that the lender can change the terms at any time - it can arbitrarily decide that it doesn’t like what you’re doing with the device, decide you’re in breach, and hit that remote kill switch. A lot of these things could technically happen before too, but the barriers have been dramatically lowered now.

On top of this, there are great privacy concerns as well. What kinds of additional information does the lender have? What right do they have to things like our location, our habits, when we use it, and all of the other personal details that they can infer from programs like this?

There are probably lots of other issues here, but another part of the problem is that we can’t even start to imagine what kinds of nefarious behaviors they can execute with this new information and power. We are well into the age where our devices are becoming our enemies instead of our advocates. I shudder to think what the world would look like 20 years from now if this kind of behavior isn’t stopped.

Not an unreasonable thought, but my question is what is the process to disable? In your examples, there are legal steps/requirements to repossess those assets.

In this case I can’t imagine the process is longer than “press the brick button and extort money”

For every single one of those scenarios, a set of legal processes need to be exhausted. This app gives the lender the ability to do whatever they want, whenever they want, without following a set of legal processes.

That’s dystopian mentality at it’s greatest.

Oh nono no, the world is much worse than that:

• If you make all your car payments on time except one, the bank can still repossess your car.

• If you pay your mortgage or rent on time every time except once, the bank can initiate the process of eviction.

Remember: the power triangle points down

What about for people like me?

I bought my device outright. No loans, no payment plans and no reason for that functionality to exist on my phone. Yet there it is, just waiting to be taken advantage of whether there is a valid reason or not.

This is the kind of apathy that leads to phrases like, “If only we had known” but we do … and do nothing about it.

I can and will at least do my part for myself and encourage others to do the same.

This is classic efficient market hypothesis brain worms, the kind of cognitive dead-end that you arrive at when you conceive of people in purely economic terms, without considering the power relationships between them. It’s a dead end you navigate to if you only think about things as they are today – vast numbers of indebted people who command fewer assets and lower wages than at any time since WWII – and treat this as a “natural” state: “how can these poors expect to be offered more debt unless they agree to have their all-important pocket computers booby-trapped?”

-Cory Doctorow from his blog, unintentionally addressing you

I agree completely, but it’s an odd way to go about repossession.