Comment by matheusmoreira
1 month ago
> I'm not sure what the right call is here.
I am sure.
The right call is to never send any data from the device to anyone unless the user explicitly tells the device to do it.
The only thing the device should do is whatever its user tells it to do.
The user didn't tell it to do this. Apple did.
> But the conclusion "Thus, the only way to guarantee computing privacy is to not send data off the device." isn't true
Irrelevant. It was never about privacy to begin with. It was always about power, who owns the keys to the machine, who commands it.
Vectorization, differential privacy, relays, homomorphic encryption, none of it matters. What matters is the device is going behind the user's back, doing somebody else's bidding, protecting somebody else's interests. That they were careful about it offers little comfort to users who are now aware of the fact "their" devices are doing things they weren't supposed to be doing.
Complete nonsense. *All networked devices do things behind their users back* at this point, and have for years, and do not ask for consent for most of it. And users would REJECT granular opt-in as a terrible UX.
Let's look at the primary alternative, Android. It generally does not provide you this level of granular control on network access either without rooted hacks. Apps and the phone vendor can do whatever they want with far less user control unless you're a deep Android nerd and know how to install root-level restriction software.
Yes, apps going behind people's back and exfiltrating personal information has become normal. That's not an argument, it's merely a statement of fact. This shouldn't be happening at all. The fact it got to this point doesn't imply it shouldn't be stopped.
No one's advocating for granular opt in either. There are much better ways. We have to make it so that data is toxic to corporations. Turn data into expensive legal liabilities they don't want to deal with. These corporations should not even be thinking about it. They should be scrambling to forget all about us the second we are done with them, not covertly collecting all the data they possibly can for "legitimate" purposes. People should be able to use their computers without ever worrying that corporations are exploiting them in any way whatsoever.
The Android situation is just as bad, by the way. Rooting is completely irrelevant. You may think you can hack it but if you actually do it the phone fails remote attestation and the corporations discriminate against you based on that, usually by straight up denying you service. On a very small number of devices, Google's phones ironically, you can access those keys and even set your own. And it doesn't matter, because the corporations don't trust your keys, they only trust the keys of other corporations. They don't care to know your device is secure, they want to know it's fully owned by Google so that you can't do things the corporations don't like.
It's not something that can be solved with technology. Computer freedom needs to become law.