What is a technology/gadget you refuse to use and why?

Smart speakers with personal assistants like Amazon Echo etc. Not remotely useful enough to be worth placing spying Equipment all over my home.

Wireless headphones. So now I'm supposed to recharge my headphones and get worse sound quality for it? In a few years they become e-waste, while good wired headphones can last decades. No thanks.

Everything that need a pay subscription to work.

Virtual assistants, e.g. Alexa, Cortana, Siri

I don't want to interact with the companies they represent basically at all, let alone give them nearly unfettered access to my electronics and their data.

I don't use the apps on my smart TV because I have a separate streaming device and I don't trust that the smart TV apps will be updated properly.

Apple anything

Smart watches.

Couple of reasons:

• I like my mechanical watches. They aren't the expensive flashy ones, but I like the way they look and especially like the mechanical engineering. It's one of the (maybe only?) Item I can think of that I use daily and 'does something' without electricity. Smart watches are nothing like that.

• When I want to be offline I can just ignore my phone or flip it upside down. Having notifications on my wrist all day long wouldn't be good for my mental health. It annoys me so much when I see people looking at and using their smartwatch mid conversation because they are so addicted to it. And I know I would be the same once I start using it.

• It's expensive and e-waste after a few years.

Any smart home stuff. The story with Amazon shutting down someone’s account and all their devices is terrifying. Frankly I should probably unplug my smart speakers.

The Apple Watch is neat for health stuff but I don’t see a need for another device to charge.

OLED and Mini/MicroLED screens for PWM sensitivity. Even LED lights are starting to hurt my head.

VR/AR is just Ready Player One stuff.

Smart watches.

I do not need an additional notification screen. I see 0 benefits

Any of the camera doorbells or security systems that ship all the footage to their own cloud. It’s unsettling to have devices with cameras semi controlled by a third party like that.

Most social media.

I used to use reddit, I have moved all my presence over here. That's about it.
I have a FB Messenger account because that is how a lot of my family keeps in touch with me, and I have this. I had a proper FB account back when I was in uni and Facebook was still only for uni students, but I think I dropped it shortly after that.

It's not some grand principled stance, I just don't get most of them because I am apparently an old man. Like Instagram, why do I want to share pictures with just random people? How am I networking with anybody by doing so? I honestly don't get why it is so popular.

Does Facebook count because I was once in trouble with the police here for something completely unrelated to the Internet and they asked me several times for my Facebook account which didn't exist anyway

Made me think they were fishing for anything and anything they read on there would have likely ended up twisted against me.

So yeah I refuse to use it.

Voice commands on anything. It just feels silly.

As far as possible I try to avoid:

• All things from big tech because privacy, see Schrems II and their terms on use of personal information for own purposes

• Non Open Source tech because privacy or other malicious functions

• Tech that are prone to planned obsolescence because of special batteries etc. and can't be fixed with for example a custom ROM on Android

I go out of my way to avoid cloud-based products. Which- is funny, because I do a LOT of home automation, and many of the cheap products, are cloud-interconnected shit, which will go obsolete in a few years.

Need... a list of reasons? I got you covered. https://static.xtremeownage.com/blog/2022/reasons-to-avoid-cloud-based-automation-products/

• Google/Apple/Samsung pay. They've had enough data over the years without knowing my banking habits.
• Alexa/smart speakers. Always listening device in the house? No thanks
• Smart doorbell. I don't want to send data directly to whoever Amazon wants to share it with yet I can't avoid being recorded whilst walking the dogs round the neighbourhood
• AI. Nervous about where this is heading

Facebook, Twitter and now Threads. Have no interest and zero use for that stuff.

Self driving cars or honestly the majority of car tech introduced in the last 5 years or so, such a lane keeping assist or other drivers "aids" which ultimately seem to distract drivers more than ever help them.

LLMs. Despite how absurdly useful they are, I can recall a time when I had the skills of remembering phone numbers naturally and being able to easily navigate with no maps of any kind.

These skills have deteriorated significantly in the past 10 years, and they're not the only ones. The common thread they all have is my smartphone replaced them.

I fear losing a skill that is less innocuous, from the new tech effectively replacing my need to practice it.

Anything "smart" exepct smartphone.
I dont want more stuff collect my data, and I am lazy to selfhost it.

@mayflower
Anything that has something to do with Meta.
I trying to ditch all non open source software, it's hard but I'm hopeful.

expired

Anything that has the word "smart" in it.

Smart Watches.

1. I don't want to take care of charging for yet another device. Plus, analog watches are beautiful!

2. Already trying to limit my screen time, no reason to check notifications the instant they pop.

3. Don't want to be conscious of my heart rate and sleep schedule all the time. Also have some privacy concerns about real time data associated with me making its way into big tech's servers.

Apple Ecosystem. Since I learned that iTunes changes mp3 files when "sync" to iTunes I stopped using apple products. That was back when iPhone 5 was released.

Tablets, I don't see the appeal of a big phone device that can't fit your pocket and can't make calls

Tiktok because Twitter already made me spend all my time raging out at random annoying assholes until I finally quit it and apparently tiktok is just that but with a more effective algorithm.

Also "ragebait but video" is like the last thing I need.

Voice commands. I get the utility if you're disabled or elderly, but it seems like a hassle to anyone else.

Any smart home tech that isn't fully self-hosted. I'm far from a privacy hardliner, but that's one line I won't let the corpos cross.

Smart watches, as I'm a big fan of mechanical watches. I don't need my wrist to be a place for constant notifications and distractions.

Anything with a camera or mic in my house.Mit's plenty bad my phone doesn't have hardware switches, who tf wants to pay to wiretap their own house?

"The cloud".

In the end "the cloud" is just someone else's hard drive. Call me old fashioned, but I'll keep my data on my own hard drives.

A helicopter. RIP Kobe 🙏

Almost all smart things, except a smartphone, which sadly I can't avoid. Maybe I just don't want to be connected 24/7.

Home smart devices in general. I'm avoiding Alexa, Siri or any other thing like that. Besides the obvious privacy issues I see about them, I can only imagine being alone at home, Alexa thinking something talked to her and responding in a distorted voice. No, thanks.

I'm considering a home assistant at some point, by setting up a proper network for the smart devices alone, but that's as far as I'll go.

for all the people saying smart devices/homes, you all should check out rhasspy/piper on github. It by itself is a TTS system but it's integrated into an offline smart-home system and a few other projects in the same vein. The links are on their git page and its pretty damn interesting. I personally use it for audiobooks after training my own voice but a lot of people want an amazon/google alternative. I may or may not have just trained a model on the same voice that amzn uses lol.

Generative AI. Dall-E just produces dumb images. ChatGPT is absolutely useless, nothing more than some kind of novelty toy. The fact that people are asking it questions and believing it is just so plain stupid. And if i need to do research to be able if it just talks bullshit again - why bother asking it in the first place?

The air fryer 💀

A housemate owns one and I hate it. It pulls such an irresponsible amount of juice you gotta turn a bunch of other stuff off or it trips the circuit breaker. And literally the ONLY thing it actually cooks very well is french fries.

Oculus Rift. Would love a VR headset and the Rift is at a great cost point for it's level of function. No way that I'm locking myself to Facebook with a piece of hardware though.

Smart home products where I can't replace the OS with an open source one.

Whatsapp and all the other Zuckware shit.

most things that have internal, irreplaceable batteries

the "cloud". I try to selfhost as much as possible

Bluetooth. Pairing never works right and if you ever finally make it, the device you're trying to use runs out of battery.