Printers are universally one of the most frustrating gadgets to own and operate. Knowing this, HP is offering to manage all the hardware and ink supplies necessary for at-home printing: You’ll just need to sign away your soul, er, personal data first. The company’s new “All-In” printer rental plan requires a constant internet connection and pulls information about your devices, documents, and other “metrics” whenever you print.
HP launched its printer subscription service on Thursday. Although $6.99 per month gets you an HP Envy and 20 printed pages, $35.99 bumps you to an HP OfficeJet Pro and 700 printed pages. Exceeding these page counts will run you an extra dollar for each 10- to 15-page print job. Whenever your rented printer gets low on ink, it triggers a resupply shipment to your door, and if the printer itself breaks down, HP will reportedly send you a replacement the next business day. This part sounds pretty convenient, especially for those with their fair share of printer-related headaches (AKA just about everyone).
But the trade-off is a privacy nightmare. While most modern printers can connect to the internet, many printer owners skip this step, choosing instead to rely on their device’s quicker and simpler wired option. HP’s All-In Plan, meanwhile, requires you to keep your rented printer online. Though this is ostensibly to provide the time-saving ink delivery service mentioned earlier, a glance at the fine print reveals what personal data will be siphoned via that constant connection.
In addition to tracking the printer’s online or offline status, page count, and ink levels, your rented printer will look at the types of documents you’re printing (e.g., PDF, JPG, Word), the types of devices that initiated the print job, “peripheral devices,” and other “metrics” related to the service, the All-In Plan’s terms read. This is on top of the personal information HP collects upon initiating the plan, like your location and your company name (if you have one). By signing up for the service, the terms say, you “grant to HP a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free right to use, copy, store, transmit, modify, create derivative works of and display [your] non-personal data for its business purposes.”
In other words, while the All-In Plan supposedly doesn’t capture the contents of your printed documents, it captures everything else—and it can use that data for virtually any “business purpose” HP deems appropriate.
It’s tough to get out of an All-In Plan once you’re all-in. Each plan consists of a two-year agreement; at the end of that period, you have 10 days to return your hardware to HP before you incur late fees. If you decide to end your plan early, you’ll have to fork up a prorated amount ranging from $270 to $60. This is at odds with Thursday's comments by HP consumer services boss Diana Sroka, who announced that the All-In Plan is meant to be a “flexible” service for families and small businesses. Sroka claimed that 90% of consumers involved in the pilot program kept their subscriptions after the two years were up.
