The hope is that the company bombs, and that the people who got this television get to keep it with no strings attached. You know, like what happened with the Gizmondo, or the CueCat.
It's hard to imagine that the financials for this really make sense. You're not gonna get $500 of advertising value just from scraping one household's data, so I'd imagine this is just some stupid VCs getting duped out of their money.
You agree to a license agreement when you take the TV, since it's essentially being leased to you for free under specific conditions, and in that process, you give them a credit card and authorize them to charge you $500 if you break the agreement (or lose/break it, I imagine). I'm sure it can be jailbroken, but doing that in a way that cannot be detected is much much harder.
Not to mention, it would essentially be theft. It's a freely made agreement. If you don't like the terms, the correct thing to do is to simply not make the agreement, not to agree to it and then immediately renege on your end of the deal. If you break the agreement and essentially con them into giving you a free TV that they paid for, they're absolutely going to sue you, and they'll win.
Feels more than a bit dystopian and generally gross, but at the end of the day, it's an option. If someone decides their money is worth more to them than their sanity, more power to them, and I'm happy enough that they have that option. Especially if someone doesn't otherwise watch very much TV, I can imagine someone thinking they have a better idea of how to spend several hundred dollars.
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