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Anything smart or iot, or that requires a subscription to use.
A windows license.
Games consoles. (I would consider a stream deck to be immune from this as it's just a handheld PC)
Android phones, Apple phones.
Wireless earphones.
A modern car.
Wait, why wireless earphones?
Hazarding a guess, but wireless earbuds means your Bluetooth has to be active, and your Bluetooth radio is something that can be used to track you
Ugh, yes, good point. Bluetooth is not the height of security.
I replied to another user about this, but aside from Bluetooth being a privacy nightmare, there's also the limited lifespan, the bad quality dacs, the lithium batteries and increased e-waste. Not to mention the expense. For $500 you can get genuinely very good wired headphones that will last the rest of your life. For the same price you can get mediocre wireless headphones that will eventually fail to hold a charge and become useless in X years
idk, my $90 earbuds that I use for meetings in the office and occasional personal use are almost five years old and doing fine. can't say I've noticed an issue with the battery life because they live in the charging case and only get taken out for use periods that are max a couple hours. and the quality is more than good enough.
I've got some nice proper headphones. they're not the right tool for that use case, for me.
bluetooth got real fucking creepy once you had to start having location enabled to use it.
What device? Never heard that before
Samsung Galaxy phone, admittedly years ago, cause it made me stop using bluetooth.
But a quick sanity check, to make sure i was remembering correctly, by doing a search for variations of bluetooth cant be used without location on do return results showing that I was not out of my gourd and that it does happen.
Thats absolutely insane. Have they ever bothered with an explanation?
Google changed something in android 6 and its been like that ever since, apparently.
For real? I just tried on my P10 Pro XL running GrapheneOS and I could pair, forget, re-pair with location turned off.
Track me with what? The pigeons don't actually have Bluetooth tracking readers on them
The pigeons don't, but phones do. They have access to bluetooth data from everyone who has it turned on in their phones, including yours. You're surrounded by "pigeons".
But there isn't anyone else nearby carrying a bunch of phones unless I am in public or at work, where I am tracked anyway.
Lol, we've known about Bluetooth tracking for YEARS. Apple released the iBeacon in 2013, so this isn't even remotely a controversial statement, unless you've been living under a rock. Add on the BT tracking we hear about for LPRs, and you can easily see why someone wouldn't want to keep the radio active
Also curious about wireless earphones, if it's an audio quality thing, I can understand that.
Please also reply to me so I can get a notification to see your answer
I'm not OP, but here are the downsides I'm aware of:
Foggenbooty pretty much nailed it.
Poor repairability, but also, why would I use 2 cheap dacs (1 in each earbuds), when I would use wired earphones and have 1 good dac. And the fact lithium needs to be mined for 2 batteries is super problematic considering the conditions lithium miners face.
Of course then there's the issue that everything with a battery has a limited lifespan. Those batteries will die one day and render your wireless earphones useless. My headphones will last for the rest of my life, meaning less e-waste is generated.
BT being active is a privacy nightmare, and the ones that require apps is also a privacy nightmare.
But then also they are just inferior to wired headphones in every way. So yeah, I'm not gonna buy an objectively worse product for way more money than their wired counterparts, that also exploits lithium miners and our planet and is also a privacy nightmare.
I got fed up after the battery died on my 4th pair of AirPods, and the 20+ year old Shure IEMs I have, still work good as the day I bought them.
I have 4 pairs of AirPods on my nightstand where only one ear works, and the other ear gets maybe minutes of usable time, or is crackly and awful sounding. To be fair, one pair went through the wash. But even then, I’d rather wash a pair of 25 dollar wired headphones, than another 250 dollar pair of AirPod pros.