Kind of fascinating the whole tinfoil spying angle was about governments, but turns out even if governments didn't do it companies now have every incentive to do it to monetize your data.

Yes, quite clever. No iron ring for the engineer, but I’m sure they were briefly proud of themselves.

That’s a good question re: gdpr. Regional activation of those modules in FW revision is certainly possible. But my guess is that the difference relates to the payload contents and whether or which PII is permitted by any particular local laws, since I expect that would maximize profits.