I sometimes wonder how these decisions get made within companies. I mean you are network hw vendor, how do you get convinced to embed adware/spyware into your products without compromising on trust? I'd fire all concerned if I were on the board and understood what the brand meant.
The decision maker is a product manager. The person has an agenda. With Unifi that seems to be: let us build a proper remote management interface and new fancier UI at all costs (and with some evil thinking a subscription service). Over time they become so invested that even of the become aware of the real customer need they cannot jump of from what they started.
Other example: the other Ubiquiti product manager check offs feature lost: IDS check, firewall check, pppoe check. Seeing that they are half baked he ignores.
I do not think that Ubiquiti problems is the engineering they outsourced. It is the product management they screwed up. They are not listening to what user wants. The indian IT guys are delivering.
And honestly: it is an ad. No ad network. They know our network better than us by their cloud management ... They do not need to analyze us. When they want to be an ad network they could do much worse things (like the telcos do).
I’m not saying it’s ethically right, but from a business perspective, the question is inverted: how can you NOT spy on everyone?
There’s virtually no regulation on data collection, every other company is already doing it with no repercussions (especially home ISPs who you have no choice over and can see/sell everything you do!), anyone doing it is making a ton of money while destroying competitors, and virtually nobody in the public cares at all.
The only people speaking against it only have a voice because they’re already rich, mostly from collecting data, so anything they say rings hollow at best.
