Comment by Almondsetat
8 months ago
But here is the problem: just like with cryptography it's an all-or-nothing game. You can either have E2EE all of the time or none of the time. There is absolutely no mechanism that would allow your child to truly own his phone but magically allow you to take complete control of it when necessary.
Correct. The parent can truly own the phone and allow the child restricted access. It's reasonable for this to be true in a technical sense even if the child owns the phone in a legal sense.
>It's reasonable for this to be true in a technical sense even if the child owns the phone in a legal sense.
By the same metric, it's reasonable for a consenting adult to own their phone in a legal sense while the true owner is Apple (which they willfully paid for this). So in this case yes, iPhone owners are real owners even if it's a complete walled garden.
What I find unreasonable is a situation where the owner of the hardware can't back out of the arrangement (while continuing to use the hardware). Someone might initially want Apple as their sysadmin, then learn that Apple is making decisions they don't like.