The "if it's free" trope comes up on the regular in these threads. There are numerous examples out there, but off the top of my head, I pay for my cell service, my car's gas, airline tickets, and my rent, and all of those push advertising on me anyways.
While there is an argument for a product needing a revenue stream to survive, paying for a product clearly does not save you from ads and data collection. The company is there like Bilbo Baggins, holding the One Ring, and asking itself, "After all, why shouldn't I have both revenue from the customer and the ad revenue?"
Well, I wasn't the GP but I see their point. Because today, buying a product isn't enough. Subscriptions and rent-seeking is where it's at.
Once you've bought a smart TV, it shouldn't really be any of Roku's business what you watch, but you basically have to airgap any brand of "smart" TV to avoid data collection.
Cars are much more computerized nowadays, so it would not be a stretch to imagine they have data harvesting software somehow (especially in light of Volkwagen's emissions test cheating); but if I've bought a car, it's mine, so why allow that? And then there's Ford's idea to have self-driving vehicles drive them back to the dealership if you miss a payment, which is a lot less time-gracious than missing utilities or anything like that.
The last time I paid for a laptop with Microsoft on it I still got ads shoveled in my face, and of course there's all the telemetry to deal with. Apple had that drama a few months back with people not being able to launch certain apps because some connection to their servers wasn't being made that would allow it, and Apple products go for premium.
It would seem rather prudent to assume that if you buy a product and it is electronic, there is probably some mechanism to transmit data to the manufacturer, because IoT and profit and why the fuck not.
