The line is drawn at the network layer: the point at which my computer talks to their computer. If I don't like what their client is doing, I can reverse engineer their network communications and make my own client that lies to the server.
Like online video games. The game client ultimately doesn't matter. I can trash it, make my own client and automate the whole game if I want.
You sold me a device, which also means you sold me the software within because the device is useless without it. The software is not separate from the device, it is the device.
Of course, that doesn't mean I can do whatever I see fit with the software; I cannot redistribute it under my own terms. But insofar the actions I take with the software strictly pertain to my own usage of my own device, I should be allowed to do it. And it also means you (the company) shouldn't be able to do with the software installed on my device as you see fit.
Despite HN’s desire, the vast majority of touch points in our daily lives are NOT open source. I’d rather laws be setup to safeguard my privacy versus relying on “FOSS” as if that’s a panacea.
There is a weird mistrust of Apple here, despite them doing nothing to betray it
With a product like the iPhone you’re purchasing access to an iteration of a design. Delivering that to you in a white shrink wrapped box is a clever marketing illusion. You can’t see the many huge factories full of calibrated robotic pick and place machines or the lithography setup used to create the chips or the lines of workers that assembled the phone one tiny piece at a time. You don’t see the endless cell towers on the horizon and all the engineers that maintain them. And we haven’t even begun to discuss the human labor that forged the design. There’s easily 500 straight years of skilled engineering labor in the modern iPhone. Perhaps even double that.
Here’s my point already. There’s some brain damaged, mentally ill, psychotic people who like to rape children, take photos of it and share it with their friends. Then what happens is those kids go kill themselves. This problem is happening at scale and it’s not in the interests of the group to let it continue. If the group believes it’s interests and your own diverge, you’ll quickly discover who really owns that device. They control the product they designed and manufactured and they can do whatever they want via signed software update, and you can do exactly nothing about it. That’s a fact.
A $1200 iPhone might be the best deal ever offered to a human being in recorded history. But you’re buying a service, leasing a disposable product. You’re a guest. That’s the truth.
It’s a really ugly image I have of the simple type of person who’s having a hard time choosing between email privacy and stopping a child predator.
I'm buying a phone. I'm not buying a service, an experience, a design or whatever. I'm buying a phone. How is it even possible to twist this?
Buying a phone is really just a fancy way of saying I'm buying a computer. And if this world was just, this computer would not execute a single instruction without my consent. I don't really care what "the group" wants, they're not gonna use my computer for it.
> It’s a really ugly image I have of the simple type of person who’s having a hard time choosing between email privacy and stopping a child predator.
I don't have a hard time choosing between anything. I will choose privacy every single time. If authorities want to stop crime, they can go out there and do real police work. They don't get to surveil everyone on earth just because it would make things easier for them.
If you have such an easy time giving up your privacy and freedoms, then you should be the first to be scanned. Who are you anyway? You're not even posting under your real name, threshold.
This idea that you’re somehow special and exist in a vacuum is privileged and arrogant. You’re relying on other people to do everything for you. They feed you and look after you when you’re sick. And they build these fantastic technologies and work long hard hours and die early just to make it affordable. You got a great deal, the best any living human ever was offered. But the group asks you to run a program you can’t even see so their children don’t get raped and suddenly you’ve been cheated and violated and wronged.