today we're going to look at some famous times tech companies have screwed over
their customers in the pursuit of more money because who hasn't felt like
they've been hosed at some point first up a company that's actually beloved by
quite a few people Nintendo although their business model of publishing
quality first party games that has kept them in better graces with many gamers
than say EA they've been the subject of
plenty of criticism for going overboard when protecting their intellectual
property this could honestly a whole video on its own but we're going to talk
about a couple of their greatest hits back in 2020 Nintendo made headlines for
sending a cease and assist letter to the organizers of a major Super Smash Bros
melee tournament alleging that they were using an unauthorized emulator to allow
the tournament to take place while it may seem to make sense that a major game
publisher wouldn't want pirated copies of one of their Smash Hits going around
the problem was that the tournament was only moved online that year because of
the covid-19 pandemic this was a terrible look for
Nintendo as the organizers were trying to keep players socially distanced for
safety reasons and Nintendo had not and
still hasn't provided any legal way for
players to play melee online on current Hardware Nintendo was of course within
its rights to do this but you think a company so concerned about piracy would
try to make its own games more accessible for those who want to play them and also allow greater exposure to
folks who might be interested in buying them this however often hasn't happened
with the company not only not offering authorized ways to play older titles but
also being very aggressive with going after fan projects that weren't made for
profit and even being heavy-handed with how they approached fan videos in 2013
while other Publishers generally didn't have much issue with game footage being
posted to YouTube Nintendo instead claimed ad revenue on let's play videos
that featured their games meaning none of that sweet sweet YouTube money would
go to the creators Nintendo responded to that backlash by creating a
controversial creators program that gave a cut of the proceeds to these players
but the up to 40% cut Nintendo was still taking led to yet more uproar until they
finally axed the program in 2018 but people were left wondering why
Nintendo hated the idea of free advertising so much let's step away from
video games and talk about an anti-consumer tactic that was so intentionally confusing that it drew an
official comparison to ancient EP poetry
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family's digital world today Amazon doesn't seem like a company that you'd
immediately think of as anti-consumer with what with a fast shipping and a
reputation for low prices and a relatively permissive return policy but
the way it gets people to pay for that fast shipping has been undoubtedly Shady
in 20123 the American Federal Trade Commission sued Amazon over its use of
dark patterns basically manipulative design tactics to deceive consumers into
participating in Amazon Prime which as you probably know is a subscription
service where Shoppers pay monthly or yearly for faster shipping and other
perks like Luna cloud gaming Prime music
watching rings of Power with commercials although signing up for Prime isn't hard
trying to cancel a subscription or Auto renewal has been a very different story
according to the FTC a user would have to go through four pages six clicks and
15 options to finally find the button to end their membership unless you think
this was just an innocuous case of poor design the FTC also said Amazon
internally called this process Iliad flow with the ilad being an ancient epic
poem about the Trojan War that's over 110,000 words long this name is a key
piece of evidence in the lawsuit that indicates Amazon made the cancellation
process deliberately lengthy and confusing a practice also referred to as
roach melling since you can check in but
you can never leave apologies to the Eagles additionally Amazon is also
accused of pelting consumers with prompts to sign up for Prime while
checking out on the site but not clearly telling them that they were signing up
for a recurring Bill Amazon has made
things more straightforward since the initial accusations from the FTC but
it's not exactly like they can just tell the government look we fixed it and get
off scott free the lawsuit is still pending in court with the FTC hoping to
make an example out of Amazon finally let's look at a company
run by the kind of guy that everyone has some sort of opinion on Elon musk's
Tesla like with Nintendo there's arguably enough to do a full video here
but we're going to focus on Tesla's full self-driving feature although FSD was
somewhat controversial from the start due to the name after all the car
doesn't actually fully self Drive the
bigger issue was the way Tesla was happy to take customers money for the future
without actually delivering on what was promised starting in 2016 hell of a year
Tesla started taking orders for FSD even though the future wasn't complete enough
to be enabled at that time however consumers were led to believe that
they'd be getting usable FSD sometime during the car's expected lifespan
especially as Tesla made the point to say that their vehicles were already
capable of running FSD from a hardware standpoint which turned out not to be
completely true Tesla drivers signed up for pre-orders partly because the
company implied the price might go up in the future and Elon Musk had made
statements that FSD would be fully implemented Within a few years
unfortunately elon's track record of predictions surrounding FSD and Mars and
well many things have been dreadfully inaccurate leading to accusations that
he knowingly over promised in order to sell more upgrades now we're near the
end of 2024 and shocker FSD still isn't
fully implemented as the tech is still incapable of driving the car without the
need for human intervention Tesla's official documents even now append the
word supervised and warned that the feature may not work as expected but
this isn't even the worst part in our opinion the cost of FSD Rose as high as
a whopping $115,000 but the company's baseline
policy is not to allow owners to transfer that feature if they upgrade to
a new Tesla meaning that people have paid exorbitant sums for a feature that
they've never been able to fully use but officially have to say goodbye to that
money if they want to upgrade to a newer model car
now to be fair Tesla has offered opportunities to transfer FSD as special
one-time amnesties though in reality
they've had to do this multiple times making FSD a little bit like the mcreb
of Car Technology and the fact that Elon has called this program an amnesty makes
it seem like Tesla is somehow doing customers a favor even though they never
really gave customers what those customers paid for we're out of time but
is there an outrageous incident from a tech company that you'd like us to rant
about let us know in the comments and you might see it in a follow-up episode
and if you'd like to learn about Futures and Tech products that you've paid for but may not even be able to use go watch
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