Comment by marcodiego
21 days ago
How did we let this happen?
Oh, yes... Actually I remember: it was a long slow series of accepting small artificial restrictions. I remember people laughing at me at the time. They said it won't matter, they didn't care, that I was paranoid...
Now... Here we are.
Unless this is used to block TikTok or ChatGPT users still won’t care and people will still laugh at us for caring, or think wanting privacy or control of your computers is suspicious or ungood.
and don't forget all the people with the dismissive remarks about how it didn't affect them on their Graphene or Calyx phones. We're all downstream of something. The real product of Android for us was always the interoperability with the normal world for the tinkerer.
>their Graphene or Calyx phones
An important reminder: if your escape hatch is an economic irrelevancy, it might as well not exist.
See: Google search with '-ai'.
Though the founders don't stand for it, they unintentionally exist to capture the most vocal people and diverge them from the norm such that the uninformed consumer has no defenses. It's as if the kinds of people who would support the civil liberty charity said "to hell with it" and founded their own parallel society.
look at all those HNers happily cheering at Apple's walled garden. Not surprising that there would be many pushing for a similar garden in Google too.
Mobile phones have never been free, we may just need to acknowledge this. From the 90s where telecom companies controlled everything, to now, where only 2 companies control everything. The only way to push back is through vendor-independent standards, especially for all security related stuff (because at the end of the day, security is the problem they are trying to "solve"). If standards exist, alternatives can be built.
eternal september
We had no part in this. The blame lies squarely with Google and its employees, who trade away user freedom for profit and career gain. Many who are smart enough to know better but instead compromise their principles. It's just another symptom of late-stage capitalism.
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