Edit: see comments for clarifications.
I am probably late on this one, but god damn this is one nasty trick by Philips.
Context; I recently decided to upgrade my shaver, from a Philips One Blade to Philips an all-in-one-trimmer-7000. As you can see on the pictures below, they changed the charger for the adapter by maybe 1–2 millimetres, just so the old charger could not be used by the old charger. Now, this normally isn’t a big deal, but with the new trimmer, the charger is USB-A only. Where’s the previous one had the plug on it instead. To me this is mildly infuriating as I know need to get an extra adapter just to charge my shaver in the bathroom. They had the exact same design for the chargers, yet changed it just slightly so they wouldn’t be able to be reused? Why… Philips… why?
Edit: many good points in the comments! I don’t know how to manually check the voltage, but seems like folks figured it out in the comments too. Should have just been USB-C!
USB is capable of data transfer but only if there’s compatible hardware in the device. The shave it doesn’t have any capacity to transmit data so what’s it going to do there’s nothing to track all they get is “someone has plugged something that requires some power into this port, but I don’t know what cuz it doesn’t have any brains”
It is important to be wary of ways that you could leak data but at the same time it’s also important not to go all paranoid tinfoil hat
It could have something like a unique identifier with some extremely simple and cheap components, and if the wall outlets of the future become USB then the business could have the ability to log it and sell that usage data to advertisers, as well as identify guests beyond just the information given during check-in.
Which sounds really stupid until you remember Google was found out to be counting people’s steps taken.
But they’d actually have to put hardware into a razor to enable that and to what end? It’s not useful info to know when you are shaving, and you already carrying a phone around in your pocket surely that’s the biggest point of data leakage. Fix that first before you start worrying about all these conspiracy theories.
This dude doesn’t believe in the “conspiracy” that companies invest in devices purely to track them and their habits. They just woke up from a coma since the 90s.