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Comment by choeger

4 years ago

Sorry to say that, but stuff like this has to happen at some point when people don't own their devices. Currently, nearly no one owns their phone and at least EU legislation is underway to ensure that it stays this way. The next step will be to reduce popular services (public administration, banking, medicine) to access through such controlled devices. Then we are locked in.

And you know what? Most people deserve to be locked in and subject to automatic surveillance. They will wake up when their phone creates a China-Style social score automatically, but then it will be far too late. It's a shame for those people that fought this development for years, though. But the "I have nothing to hide" crowd deserves to wake up in a world of cyber fascism.

12 comments

choeger

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mdp2021  4 years ago

Let us comb this a bit.

When you mention that set of population as deserving the consequences, it does not seem too far to me from "People who want trains instead of cars deserve trains". Is this relevant? The big problem is, people buy controversial services, hence finance them and endorse them, hence strengthen them, and in some cases these services make the acceptable ones extinct: the big problem is that people do not refuse what is not sensible, and sensible people have to pay.

Already here where I live, I cannot get essential services¹ because that practice made them extinct!!!

¹(exactly: public administration, tick; banking, very big tick; medicine, not yet. And you did not mention ___the cars___, and more...)

Other note: you wrote

> nearly no one owns their phone

and some of us are stuck with more reliable older devices, which soon may need some kind of replacement. If you know the exceptions to the untrustable devices, kindly share brand/model/OS/tweak.

  • fsflover  4 years ago

    > If you know the exceptions to the untrustable devices, kindly share brand/model/OS/tweak.

    https://puri.sm/products/librem-5

    • mdp2021  4 years ago

      This is beautiful, and news (to me) that make me re-breathe like around alpine pines. Thank you!

      (It makes me dream of a version which also is ruggedized and uses a high resolution OLED display... But this can easily already be the new palm companion.)

      I hope that the current difficulties in (global) manufacturing will be soon be over.

      Edit: having mentioned "pines" was not meant to be a pun - I just realized the odd potential reference to the PinePhone.

hungryforcodes  4 years ago

Why do they DESERVE to be so? Despite what you say there was and is no mechanism to really change or affect the course of these affairs.

Apple? How? Your other option is Android, who do you choose when they start to do it?

Or when governments decide to mandate that ALL phones need to legally have "scanning all the files on it and report them back to the police database" mechanisms?

The EU? Particularly how? An organization that has been deliberately structured to supersede the legitimacy of nation states and export it's power to all of it's members at the whim -- sometimes it seems -- of some aging out of touch bureaucrats.

I'm not even a #brexiter, btw.

Should Scotland become an independent nation? There was a public debate and people had opinions -- and there were mechanisms in place to act on and make a change, as an example.

There has been no public debate on this in a national sense (anywhere), and also no mechanisms by which people could decide to change it. I'm not sure people deserve it.

no_time  4 years ago

>EU legislation is underway to ensure that it stays this way.

which one?