An Atlantic writer complains that his HP printer is shaking them like a loan shark.
I discovered an error message on my computer that the company had remotely disabled my HP OfficeJet Pro. When I got to HP’s website, I knew why: the credit card I used to sign up for HP’s Instant Ink Cartridge Refill program had expired, and the company effectively locked my device in response…
Instant Ink is a monthly subscription program that claims to monitor printer usage and ink levels and automatically ship new cartridges when they run out. The name is misleading, because the monthly fee is not for the ink itself, but for the number of pages printed. (Recommended family plan is $5.99 per month for 100 pages.) Like others, I rushed through the printer setup process, only dimly aware of what I was buying. Getting ink when I need it seemed convenient enough…
The monthly fee is incurred whether you print or not, and the ink cartridges take up liminal property space. You own them, but, in essence, you rent them and your machine while you’re enrolled in the program… Here was a piece of technology he’d paid over $200 for, equipped with full ink cartridges. My printer, rarely used, was on my desk in perfect working order, but Hewlett-Packard, a technology corporation with a market capitalization of $28 billion, made it useless at the time of writing, because there was no made a monthly payment for a service to deliver new printer cartridges
Which he did not need yet … and on Twitter. A class action lawsuit pending in California alleges that the Instant Ink program has “significant pitfalls” and does not deliver new cartridges on time or allow enrollees to use cartridges purchased outside of the subscription service, resulting in the consumer being unable to print frequently. Parker Truax, an HP spokesperson, told me: “Instant ink cartridges will continue to work until the end of the current billing cycle in which [un cliente cancela]. can buy and use Original HP standard or XL cartridges.”
“Nobody told me that if I canceled, all those cartridges would stop working,” complains another HP printer owner quoted in the article. “I guess this is our future, where your printer ink spies on you.”
But the article ultimately concludes that printer racketeering is “just one example of how digital subscriptions have permeated physical technology so completely that they’re blurring the lines of ownership. Even if I paid for it, can I really say I’m owner of my printer yes can HP flip a switch and render it inert?”
