Another first.

Oh, Australia, where at least most of the population is legally required to be half-helpless and dependent on companies. That makes more sense. In places where you're actually allowed to do things without paying a company your day's wages to send a professional to tell you it's okay first, people are often allowed to offer you the choice whether or not to pay them for extras beyond the essential product. I mean things like years and years of free replacements and labor (in this case, monitoring included). There can still be rules that offerings must not be deceptive or defective, so not everything can necessarily be sold on an as-is no refunds basis, but that's a smaller cost to provide. It tends to mean that working class people don't have to do without every type of nice thing, because they can choose to spend their own effort in lieu of huge piles of cash in order to make up for the extras they can't purchase on top of the essential product, whatever it is. Of course, they are then liable for the things they didn't pay someone else to assume liability for, and when it's important that something be done safely there can be requirements to verify that. But when given agency over their own lives, people tend to learn which parts to seek help with, and it's easier to find when you don't need someone who can do the entire thing from start to finish including the paperwork and guarantees in perpetuity. A competent installer crew needs a crew of office people and the backing of a company or a company's insurance policy to handle and afford all that, so they can't just charge you to do a job to your satisfaction and be done. Given how few reliable professionals there sometimes are in various trades in various places, there would often be none at all if every minor project required them to handle all that extra stuff too. This one is one that most wouldn't attempt alone and may often have some of the requirements you have, in fairness. But really while we probably all still disagree with you that this thing should be phoning home to avoid safe mode, the fact it's happening in the jurisdiction it is, which we daren't have assumed before, changes a lot. It's not an inherent fact that things should be that way, but in your legal environment unless they add adequate privacy and/or right to repair protections, a company will definitely choose to just phone home that way instead of being nice.