Tolerance for this sort of thing does vary widely, even within the US. I guess it might be more normalized here though. We have nothing, for instance, resembling Law 25 in QC, or even PIPEDA (weak sauce though it is).

Can people not understand the concept of an example? Thereâ(TM)s no place in the USA that represents the entire country. Thatâ(TM)s how diversity works. Iâ(TM)ve also encountered these scanners in NYC, Los Angeles, New Orleans, Baltimore, Chicago, Portland (OR), and probably elsewhere. Pick one of those cities and call it representative of America, if you like. Itâ(TM)s beside the point.

It depends where you are, and where you go out. If you are in Utah for instance you're much more likely to encounter them because all establishments that serve alcohol are required to check ID at the door (or at least, they were). Bouncer apps make this easier.

It's not uncommon to encounter 21+ restaurants that have a bouncer with a smart device at the door, scanning barcodes on drivers' licenses to try and weed out fakes. It's not something you'd see at, say, Applebee's though.

I know a few people who do all this stuff and more. So let me fix that for you: "I take a perverse pride in jumping through lots of hoops to avoid a few overt tracking methods, but any occupant of a first-world country who doesn't do all their business in gold and harvested human organs has a huge tracking footprint that can't be avoided, so it's all really just to make me feel better. I know that any government actor who wants to find out about me can do so with minimal effort, so really this is just an exercise in public masochism."

"Magic Leap? Those guys still exist?"

Has to be said: those of us alive to read this are the descendants of those who _did_ survive.

This is a common problem and does not just affect Windows - my Intel MacBook Air did the same thing. As did the MacBook Pro (work issued) that preceded it. Particularly fun when you get through security at the airport, grab a snack for the flight, sit down and wait for takeoff - then pull out your computer to get on WiFi and do some work/check in with coworkers to find the thing blazing hot, fans running madly, and battery down to 15%.

Realistically, even platforms that have physical media don't _really_ have physical media. Basically every AAA title has a day zero patch download of "all the stuff we fixed after we sent the supposedly gold master to be duplicated onto disks". And - dim memories of when I was last in the console world, which was PS3 era - most games lock you out of functionality you paid for (like online gameplay) unless you've updated to the latest. So really, these days, physical disks are just a token saying "I have a license for this game... for now". Yes, they are a token you can give to your cousin's ex-roommate and thereby transfer the license, but they're really not far removed from download-only games still.

The only explanation that makes sense to me is "it's a known, fixed configuration you can target longterm" - which is an advantage to devs, not to users.

As a simple audio device, it only connects an audio stream and no control or data streams. It also doesn't need to perform checks like "does the host want me to send it my list of contacts?"

You're right, of course, but manufacturers are doing their damnedest to make everything dependent on the infotainment system - as you said "everything on the canbus" - what you omitted was "and won't turn on unless you're paying the monthly subscription".

Five years from now when the updates to your in-car UI have ceased and your new phone does things the in-car UI cannot... you will feel differently. Cars age like cellphones - badly.

I happen to have recently bought a 2017 Buick, the last model year before the entertainment center included CarPlay/Android Auto. I had forgotten how bad the bad old days were - $150 updates to maps (that were always out of date anyway), weird clunky proprietary in-dash UIs, the existence of OnStar, etc. It all made sense before all these things were free/ad-supported on your cellphone. None of it makes sense now. GM simply wants those thicc revenues from their own online services, in exactly the same way that Samsung would love to cut Google out of their mobile ecosystem. In exactly the same way, GM's system will offer duplicative but always-behind-the-curve functionality in their proprietary trashbox, and everyone will have to figure out how to keep using their up-to-date mobile device as primary display. My car appears to have been engineered _specifically_ to avoid any surface flat and non-porous enough to make a good mounting point for a cellphone. I'm sure the more modern ones are also. Suction cup on the middle of the car's inbuilt screen seems to be the best ergonomic answer.

In large companies, these pointless mandates come down from higher-ups who are completely divorced from individual contributor reality - and are initially completely ignored by everyone below a certain level in the org chart. Ground-level HR doesn't want to enforce these orders, because they're measured on (inter alia) employee satisfaction. If the higher-ups don't go investigate, they won't find that their whims are being ignored, and life will go on - everyone remote, but the top brass in blissful ignorance.

What can upset this apple cart is either a nosy higher-up who actually follows up on his diktat "just because I want to see my monkeys dancing", or a surprise event that reveals that no warm bodies are, in fact, sitting in cubicles. For example (and this is not a theoretical example) a site might get a surprise visit from a third-party inspection team, and nobody is there to answer the door. This typically leads to a progressive tightening of rules after each incident. Again, basically everyone below a certain level in the company recognizes that this is meaningless nonsense, and complies to the absolute minimum degree possible, with a strong element of "don't ask, don't tell". I've observed this at multiple organizations.

The only case where followup/investigation is guaranteed from the get-go is where RTO is explicitly put in place to cause attrition. Attrition numbers are easy to see on a single slide of a PPT, and they're watched closely. If not enough people quit, there will be an investigation as to why not enough people have been made sufficiently unhappy to leave the company.