Boing Boing: T-Mobile drives a nail into the Sidekick's coffin

Cory Doctorow rants about the fact that T-Mobile is going to end support for the games it shipped with the Sidekick mobile phone. In itself that isn't a very interesting story, but Cory says, this means that T-Mobile is going to remotely erase this data from all the Sidekicks. This is just another case of big companies sticking their faces into there customer's business. It's fine for T-Mobile to say, "We won't support X," but they should have no right to actively delete stuff from a customers device.

"Who owns your Sidekick? T-Mobile does, apparently, even if you spent full retail on it (I dropped $250 on mine). You need T-Mobile's permission to install software on their device. T-Mobile will, from time to time, decide to erase software from your device. And when you stop subscribing to their service, T-Mobile will delete all your data forever, without giving you any mechanism for moving it off the device (and without giving you the ability to design a tool that would let you do this)."

Un fortunately this seems to be a trend today in high-tech. How would people react if the same logic were applied to cars? What if GM said that you could only buy GM gas. What if Ford showed up at your house one day and replaced your V-8 engine with a 4 cylendar? I'll bet you'd be pissed. T-Mobile is doing the same thing, people shouldn't stand for this kind of activity from a company they do business with. Vote with your wallet! Use a different mobile phone carrier.