Well, there’s plenty of standards-noncompliance out there, but breaking the firmware of a peripheral you manufacture so that it can’t be properly supported by the OS driver you wrote and needs a workaround requires a special type of corporate boneheadedness.
If the bots are required to have paid transit passes and if they’re confined to off-peak hours when the subways aren’t full anyway, this could actually be a net win for mass transit: they’re putting money into the system while consuming relatively few resources, so the bots can fund improvements that benefit humans.
So the difference between the current ownership, who may be handing data over to the Chinese government and are using an algorithm that promotes undesirable content for “engagement” and propaganda purposes, and the new ownership, who I’m sure will happily sell data to anyone who pays up including thinly disguised fronts for the Chinese government, and will also use an algorithm that promotes undesirable content for “engagement” and propaganda purposes is . . . what, really, at the end of the day?