malicious qr codes have always been around. i remember the local news reports of them plastered to store directories at the mall. ya, that long ago.

forced to work in small classrooms with sniffling sick kids legally required to attend would put some teachers’ illnesses under workers’ comp?

jared/ivanka and tom brady live there too. surprised there isn’t a multi-billion dollar federal grift involved yet.

captive portal detection, certificate status verification, and iirc server settings updates. yes. none of them are ‘absolutely required’ but they do exist to improve the reliability and secure operation of the program–and none are secret nasty spying telemetry. just turn those particular settings off as desired.