Comment by ta8964586 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ta8964586 | Hacker News Reader

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Genuinely curious, how would you give users "the freedom to stop all data collection by these devices" without some kind of walled garden. Is the solution something like flatpack for all apps? but then how do you make sure all apps don't just refuse to work without permission to collect data or manage to collect information without users knowing? You can't force developers to be honest about what their app does without having a means to prevent it from being installed. Specifically for apps, I can't think of a solution that has no restrictions of software installations, but wouldn't be trivially turned into an incredibly user hostile environment.

You can monitor what calls an app makes. LittleSnitch on Mac is an example example of this.

There are going to be nefarious actors who still manage to bypass it, and there are going to be risks outside of a walled garden - and that's a meaningful choice we can provide users.

"Hey, you can stay inside the app store and get these promises, or you can install what you want and risk X, Y and Z."

Android does this.. decently well. There are issues with the google framework, but otherwise it's functional - my elderly family doesn't need me to reset their phones every month, yet I can sideload all my games and FOSS apps.

This isn't good enough. Sure you can monitor it if you have a load of time, but then what do you do when you find out its doing something evil? What do you do when you find out every app is doing something evil? You either opt out of proprietary software entirely or you let apple use their weight to force apps to stop being evil.

> I can't think of a solution

because you're only thinking of technical solutions. A comprehensive privacy framework that requires explicit user consent to data collection and gives user transparent controls accomplishes just that, without having to resort to user-hostile or complicated tech.

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