HP is part of the rent-a-printer business

The Value of a Printing Service: Why Customers Aren’t Just Faking. Why Do Some People Get Their Printers When They Don’t?

HP launched a subscription service on Thursday that rents a printer and gives it to someone for a monthly fee. HP is framing its service as a way to simplify printing for families and small businesses, but the deal also requires a long-term commitment and monitoring.

You can choose between a plan with or without a printer. They start at $6 per month and go up to $35 a month, which will get you a 700 page Office Jet Pro as well as 20 pages of prints. HP will add more for a dollar per block if you go over your page limit.

There are many people who will approve of this plan. Some people don’t care if they feel like they own their printer. The kind of person who ignores the low ink warning all the way, until I am fully out and am actually printing something critical, rather than coloring pages for their kid, for once, is a great person to receive ink before you run out.

The functions are mainly due to the fact that I don’t print as often as I would like and that I rarely encounter annoyances of printer ownership. For those who do, companies can take two paths. One of HP’s plans is to appeal to the frustration of people who bought ink and printers from a third-party and can’t use them because they moved overseas. The other approach is making printers that mostly just do the thing you want them for.

One of the most perturbing aspects of the subscription plan is that it requires subscribers to keep their printers connected to the internet. In general, some users avoid connecting their printer to the internet because it’s the type of device that functions fine without web access.

The HP Remote Monitoring Service (the “Technical Monitor”): Subscribing to HP’s Constant Connection for Business Purposes

This story originally appeared on Ars Technica, a trusted source for technology news, tech policy analysis, reviews, and more. Ars is owned by WIRED’s parent company, Condé Nast.

HP says it enforces a constant connection so that the company can monitor things that make sense for the subscription, like ink cartridge statuses, page count, and “to prevent unauthorized use of Your account.” However, HP will also remotely monitor the type of documents (for example, a PDF or JPEG) printed, the devices and software used to initiate the print job, “peripheral devices,” and any other “metrics” that HP thinks are related to the subscription and decides to add to its remote monitoring.

Subject to the terms of this Agreement, You hereby 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.