this post was submitted on 22 Mar 2024
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If the creditor wants to collect on a debt, there is a court process for that. I’ve used it. It works.
Locking the phone is not repossession. It does nothing other than sabotage the device the consumer may need to actually make the payment. The phone remains in the buyer’s possession and useless to the seller.
Power is also misplaced. What happens when the creditor decides to (illegally) refuse cash payments on the debt? Defaulting is not necessarily the debtor’s fault. This in fact happened to me: Creditor refused my cash payment and dragged me into court for delinquency. Judge ruled in my favor because cash acceptance is an obligation. But this law is being disregarded by creditors all over. If the creditor had the option to sabotage my lifestyle by blocking communication and computing access, it would have been a greater injustice.
#WarOnCash
I guess a closer analogy would be rental storage. If you don’t pay your mini storage bill, in some regions the landlord will confiscate your property, holding it hostage until you pay. And if that fails, they’ll even auction off your contents.
So in the case at hand the creditor is holding the debtor’s data hostage. One difference is that the data has no value to the creditor and is not in the creditor’s possession. It would be interesting to know if the contracts in place legally designate the data as the creditor’s property. If not, the data remains the property of the consumer.
This is covered by human rights law. Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 17 ¶2:
If the phone user did not sign off on repossession of their data, and thus the data remains their property, then the above-quoted human right is violated in the OP’s scenario.
Lemmy moment. Claims human rights are being violated because smartphone gets locked
Don’t try to strawman this. Human rights are violated when someone is deprived of their property (their data in the case at hand). If food is withheld from starving people in Gaza, your argument is like saying:
“Claims human rights are being violated because someone failed to drive a truck”
Someone not paying a phone bill doesn't equate to someone bombing Israel
They’re not at odds. We don’t have to choose between protecting UDHR Art.3 and Art.17. It’s foolish to disregard some portion of the UDHR needlessly and arbitrarily.