this post was submitted on 26 May 2025
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Today my HP printer asked my for my GPS location, to allow me to scan a document. Like why? Why is it required to use a basic option?
HP wants to know your location
literally though
Future IoT devices won't even ask. They'll just have GPS chips prebuilt into them. And you won't even be able to solve the problem by cutting the device off at the network level. Your TV and printer will just phone home via the cell network.
To sell your location to the highest bidder. Duh. So ethical.
Btw, that Nathan Fillion gif is from Castle and not Firefly.
HP printers are shit, I don't want one even if you pay me. Buy a office-class B&W laser from Brother and never worry again.
I bought a brother color laser printer during lockdown, 4 years and it's never had an issue, and I have yet to change the cartridges. I'll never go back to inkjet.
Yeah, if you don't print enough to justify a laser printer then you probably don't need a printer at all. Just go to the library when you want to print something.
Only suckers buy inkjets.
I have a Brother laser printer that I got 25 years ago that I use so little it's still on the promo cartridge and it works fine any time I need it.
Meanwhile, an ink jet my old job got a few years ago fatally clogged itself after just a few weeks of normal use.
Sadly Brother went to the dark side this year:
https://www.tomshardware.com/peripherals/printers/brother-accused-of-locking-down-third-party-printer-ink-cartridges-via-firmware-updates-removing-older-firmware-versions-from-support-portals
Even when blocking third party cartridges, they are still infinitely better than all the bullshit HP is pulling.
That story was debunked: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/03/brother-denies-using-firmware-updates-to-brick-printers-with-third-party-ink/
Because NSA.
Ostensibly, that's because the app wants Bluetooth and/or WiFi access so it can connect to the printer. Because you can use WiFi and Bluetooth to determine location (based on large crowd sourced databases of these data points that have been geolocated), the OS has to ask for location permission as well, even if you just need to see WiFi and Bluetooth.
That being said, once they have this permission, I have 0 doubt they log the actual location as well...
Mozilla used to run a free service for this, and collected that data in the background using mobile Firefox. A replacement is https://beacondb.net/, which is still building enough location data to become useful. Services like this aren't nefarious, they're actually really important in getting a quick GPS lock on mobile. Phone hardware actually have pretty poor GPS receivers, but if you can determine an approximate location prior, you get much better results, especially once supplemented with inertial measurements and snapping to mapped roads.
Devil's advocate: was this on Android? Certain wifi/Bluetooth information requires "location" permissions.