Anybody surprised when big tech companies prove they are evil? No? Well, every now and then some news go beyond the usual evilness – reaching the level of cartoon super-villains.
It seem 404 Media got their hands on a contract, which forces independent repair shops to comply with highly questionable, one-sided rules when they want to obtain OEM parts. That does not even make them authorized repair shops.
404media.co said:In exchange for selling them repair parts, Samsung requires independent repair shops to give Samsung the name, contact information, phone identifier, and customer complaint details of everyone who gets their phone repaired at these shops, according to a contract obtained by 404 Media. Stunningly, it also requires these nominally independent shops to “immediately disassemble” any phones that customers have brought them that have been previously repaired with aftermarket or third-party parts and to “immediately notify” Samsung that the customer has used third-party parts.
It is nothing new that companies dislike third-party repair and third-party spare parts. Independent repairs bring no money for the manufacturer and might make devices stay in use for longer time hurting sales. The legality of this method is highly questionable. Sharing customer data (repair shop customer!) with the manufacturer for no good reason and disassembling a device instead of repairing it will be hard to justify; even with a lot of legal TOS the repair shop might present a customer to sign.
Hopefully Right-to-Repair laws will put an end to such practices as well as unobtainable spare parts, inflated prices to discourage repairs, hardware DRM preventing repair.
Source It is worth reading the whole thing!
Side note: Ifixit ends collaboration with Samsung.