If you buy a car then they later ask you to accept a new TOS you should be able to refuse and return the car for a full refund.
You thought you had a contract with them, then they made you a counter offer. Under the Uniform Commercial Code (UCC) I think you have the right to refuse and get your money back.
They should be forced to have separate updates for fixes/updates and another for new features. fixes/updates should not require new ToS, and should be possible to auto-update for safety reasons. new features should be forced to wait for an intentional agree to update before installing.
The problem with trying to keep it under the original TOS is that the company will just ignore your rights and pretend you agreed to the new TOS. What proof do you have that you did not click "I agree?"
If you have the right to return a 3-year-old car with collision damage and get a 100% ful refund, then they will NEVER change the TOS and ask you to agree.
Also, this was the Uniform Commerical Code (UCC) for many years until they decided (IIRC) that software was not subject to the UCC. Maybe we can make the case that software has come of age and fraud is now fraud?
The problem here is that new features often involve some refactoring work. Then, if you didn't opt for feature X, the company isn't going to go out of their way to make and ship and maintain a fix for the old non-refactored version, so if you want fixes, there is no way to get them without feature X... Unless they are using feature flags of course, but then no fixes/updates are exactly "safe" for the combination of features agreed to.
Why can't they just maintain stable branches with bugfixes backported to them? You don't need feature flags for this, you can literally do this with just semver. Plenty of products support some number of previous minor versions but will backport bugfixes to them, and plenty of others have LTS releases that have a longer window of bugfixes still being made without new features.
If the claim is that there's something fundamental about car software that makes this less possible than literally every other type of software in existence, the burden is on the car companies to prove it. I strongly doubt this is the case, but if it is, I'd argue that the more prudent thing is to just _not_ keep adding features, because fixing bugs for the multi-ton behemoths hurtling alongside one another at high speeds sounds more important than literally anything that they could provide to the car that people have already decided is worthy of purchasing with the current set of features.
This being enforced sure would put an end to TOS being revised. (Which, overall, would be a good thing.)
What I dream about is consumer protection laws mandating that the car owner can simply opt out of whatever 'services' the car offers and then not be nagged about it.
Just a large, friendly dialog box with the two options 'Sure, collect all the data you can about me, my passengers, my driving habits, the environs I drive in, and whatever inferences you may derive from collating data, including, but not limited to the above. The data will be sold to whoever are willing to pay us for them.' and 'Just leave me the heck alone!'
This shit is so hilarious, it's a Kia... as Mozilla recently researched, they have updated their TOS to include storing "sexual orientation". What the hell do you need that info for? Why even expose yourself, as a company, to the potential public shaming once someone finds out that on page 542 of your new terms it says "we want to know what turns you on"?
The company doesn’t need that info. One random product manager or marketing manager that wants a promotion and has a KPI to beat Subaru cares about that metric for the 6 months that metric matters to them, and as a result hundreds of millions of people must suffer from undue stalking behavior.
You thought you had a contract with them, then they made you a counter offer. Under the Uniform Commercial Code (UCC) I think you have the right to refuse and get your money back.