Comment by matheusmoreira | Hacker News Reader

Comment by matheusmoreira | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

God when did this world get so screwed up?

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.

You don’t want to be a part of the group and reap the benefits of collaboration and economies of scale? Well then your $1200 isn’t going very far. But you can have a lump of aluminum, a pile of sand and a sheet of glass. And there’s enough left over for a huge pile of books so you can learn how to fab chips, make circuit boards, write your own operating system and build your own phone network. Good luck

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.

That's a very unreasonable take. Privacy is not reserved for "special" people, it's for everyone. A $1,200 smartphone is generally not considered a "great deal" and definitely not "the best deal ever offered to a human being in recorded history". And users are absolutely justified to oppose on-device surveillance introduced on their smartphone, regardless of whether you consider it a "product" or a "service".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com