>"Customer safety remains our highest priority," said CEO Iñaki Berroeta.
It's fun to imagine a world where a lie like this could be a legal liability. I mean an actual court case, where evidence is brought and the claim is tested. "Is customer safety a higher priority than shareholder value?" and "why don't you support old devices" and then Samsung would need to produce internal evidence to try to make their case.
Nothing like that will ever happen, but I can dream.
I don’t follow. In this case, the law required everyone to do what they did: provide an update, warn subscribers to update, and eventually drop devices that chose not to heed the warnings.
> Under the federal Emergency Service Call Determination, all operators must block handsets that can't complete Triple Zero calls if they remain unpatched for 28-35 days after the first warning – a rule TPG says it followed.
How would you even begin to pin down what “customer safety” means here? Isn’t it very much in the spirit of safety to say “if it can call at all, it must be able to place an emergency call; if it can’t place an emergency call on the current emergency calling scheme, you have to prohibit all other calling too”?
Plus, safety from unpatched devices on the customers’ network is safety too, right? Would it be “safer” to force the system update onto handsets without letting the subscriber decide?
Plus, just because something is a “priority” doesn’t mean you’re good at it…
What I was saying is that at least in the US any bad thing that happens to a company can be treated as securities fraud. Company had security breach but they said they follow best practices. There likely will be a lawsuit saying that they mislead investors. Not saying it makes sense more pointing out that companies often do get sued for statements they make.
It's hard to understand how this is Samsung's liability. The device was extremely old (nearly 10 years), and an update was available nonetheless. The user had received multiple warnings and notifications that this update needs to be applied for emergency calls to continue working.
When updating devices that old almost certainly means that they become unusable, I can't fault the person for not updating. I've learned not to apply updates any more, in the spirit of "if it isn't broken, don't fix it".
Exactly. I'm mystified as to why this is not addressed anywhere in the article. Did the phone work to make phone calls or not? If yes, then a user should not be expected to guess that he can't call emergency services.
And WHY could he not call emergency services if the phone worked for other calls? Shoddy reporting and, it sounds like, a shoddy system.
Australia shut down its entire 3G network, which a lot of devices used for emergency calls. A lot of phones worked with 4G still but did not support using 4G for emergency calls.
The telco's solution was to sell new phones to people, which a lot of people didn't do. Apparently all of these phones that still worked were flagged and blocked from using 4G but this apparently wasn't the case.
"A lot of phones worked with 4G still but did not support using 4G for emergency calls."
Now that should be illegal. It's absurd to think that everyone whose phone works just fine for regular calls is going to receive, understand, and heed upgrade messages. That's hugely irresponsible.
Furthermore, it looks like these customers may NOT have received any such messages: If the phone company could identify a user's phone as being out of date and send it an update warning, then that company could have banished it from its network. I see no excuse for what happened here.
We have all lost functionality of a device we paid for after an update. You can’t fault a user for avoiding it. It’s the root that should be addressed.
The quote is from the CEO of TPG, not Samsung. TPG was required to block any phones that couldn't place 000 calls. TPG claims to have done that, yet the phone wasn't blocked. If they didn't, they would seem to be very definitely liable.
if you said your product is the best in the world that could be directed at yourself and still be puffery. advertising is expected and usually allowed to be inaccurate
I think it would be a worse world then the one we live in today where we allow some leeway for exaggerations.
As it is everyone and everything are overly careful of saying anything that might have legal implications. One outcome of that are new laws that are almost incomprehensible.
It's fun to imagine a world where a lie like this could be a legal liability. I mean an actual court case, where evidence is brought and the claim is tested. "Is customer safety a higher priority than shareholder value?" and "why don't you support old devices" and then Samsung would need to produce internal evidence to try to make their case.
Nothing like that will ever happen, but I can dream.