Yep. They have taken a really big hit on the nestcams stories even though in that case it was user error.
In Europe, a lot of the regulation is designed around the philosophy that it should not be possible for the customer to harm themselves with the product.
In the US, a lot of regulation is designed around the philosophy that the customer should be warned that certain activities might allow themselves to harm themselves with the product.
These are very different in practice when it comes to both engineering and interface design.
As we already mentioned, Google has had to pay very large fines, some in the billions of dollars, in the EU in the last couple of years, and they haven’t even gotten around to looking at privacy yet.
I think they’ve decided if they want to sell into the EU market, they need to follow the EU consumer protection policies more closely. So that means cutting off a lot of feature options that were previously available.
When you think about it, it’s similar to what Samsung has done with regard to arming/disarming the security features of smartthings, including even unlocking a lock, in the design of the V3 app versus the V2 classic app.
FAQ: Why can’t I use Geopresence or an Automation to set the alarm state in the new (V3) app?
So I don’t think these features are coming back to google. There will always be a few companies which have a more open philosophy, but there’s just too much business strategy based on liability risk reduction for everyone to leave it open.
I’ve previously mentioned the example of childproof caps on prescription medications in the US. Once they made it a law that all the prescriptions had to have these caps, they then discovered that there was a fairly large population of disabled and elderly people who couldn’t get their medication bottles open!
So they modified the laws to allow you to individually request “easy open” caps when you place the prescription order. That worked OK for a couple of years.
But then “best practices” changed again so that now most of the mail order pharmacies ship the medication in a bottle with a child lock Installed, and a means of disabling the child lock after you get the bottle if you want it to be easy open.
The problem with that is it means that people like me have to have someone else set up the Cap the first time after the package arrives before the bottle can be opened. It can be quite annoying. but “safety first“ and all that. 