Comment by gjsman-1000
6 days ago
"It's my device, I should be able to do whatever I want with it!"
The reason this argument isn't holding water and swaying popular opinion, in my opinion, is because everything else in life is heavily regulated, licensed, and restricted.
"It's my car, I should be able to do whatever I want with it!" does not hold, either for driving, or removing the catalytic converter, or changing the tuning to be able to roll coal, or uninstalling the seat belts.
"It's my kitchen, I should be able to do whatever I want with it!" does not hold when I can't sell my baked goods to my neighbors without a license, or replace the interior of my kitchen without a permit.
"It's my home, I should be able to do whatever I want with it!" does not hold when I can't build a deck, add an addition, or even install a new electrical outlet, without permission. Have you ever tried putting something in your front yard?
Unless we agree to fight for freedom everywhere, the only logical excuse is that the digital world doesn't have real world consequences, except that it increasingly patently does now. It's no surprise to me then that the argument does not resonate. That does mean we may have to allow people to have an uncomfortable level of freedom, across the board, in order to be logically consistent, and broaden chance of success.
The technologist sees licensing from Google to develop Android apps as tyranny. The average person asks "where have you been? What can you do without a license?"
> I can't sell my baked goods to my neighbors without a license, or replace the interior of my kitchen without a permit.
You can though. No one will stop you from doing either of those things.
> I can't build a deck, add an addition, or even install a new electrical outlet, without permission. Have you ever tried putting something in your front yard?
A deck or addition might draw attention and run afoul of some rule depending on where you live, but a lot of places won't care. If you want to put in an outlet, the world's your oyster. The only real consideration is if you're worried you may do it wrong and may run into insurance denials after a catastrophe or something. You don't actually need anyone's permission. And it's October; I have decorations in my front yard right now. No one was consulted about this.
It's like my air conditioner broke a couple weeks ago, so I ordered a capacitor off amazon and fixed it. I've never touched one of these things before, but the only one stopping you from unscrewing it and going to town is you. If you passed high school you ought to have a basic understanding of how stuff works and be able to do some light reading to make sure you're doing this correctly and safely. LLMs make this even easier.
These phone restrictions, by contrast, would be like if your AC or electrical panel somehow required a licensed professional to activate new parts. Or even more on point, required someone registered with e.g. Carrier (not actually any kind of professional certification; just someone gatekept by a business trying to monopolize things).
> No one will stop you from doing either of those things.
It's literally illegal in many US states and countries to do so. In my home state, MN, it is tightly regulated what kinds of "cottage food" you are allowed to sell.
You're confusing ability with legality. Try loading up some food you cooked in your kitchen and selling it out of your car, door-to-door, and watch what happens. This is despite, for most people, judging the health risks of food being wildly easier than the security risks of a sideloaded app.
> These phone restrictions, by contrast, would be like if you AC or electrical panel somehow required a licensed professional to activate new parts.
That already exists in car repair; with key reprogrammers and especially anything engine-tuning being restricted to licensed individuals. Also, good luck messing with your catalytic converter, without the ECU by law detecting it and getting very angry. Take my relative's diesel truck from 2015 - a single failed sensor in the exhaust, and it caps itself as low as 30 MPH.
> You're confusing ability with legality
No, you are. Google's restricting the ability, by decree. Laws restrict the legality, in certain places, by democratic consensus.
That's more a reflection of your neighbors not wanting to deal with your door-to-door nuisance of a business. If you have people that want to buy food from you, exactly nothing will happen. Same deal with e.g. babysitting/day care. Exactly no one will care if you do it or if you casually offer it in conversation with a parent. People might get annoyed if you go door-to-door soliciting about it and interrupt their day.
Ability vs. legality is the point; these things in practice aren't that heavily regulated, licensed, and restricted, and in fact no one will check up on you or try to stop you at all unless you piss someone off by somehow turning it into an annoyance. I don't know why you'd even think to check whether most of the stuff you listed is legal.
Using car restrictions (which are obviously mostly anti-consumer, especially for EVs) as some justification for similar actions in phones is interesting, to say the least.
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note that you're confusing selling with ability. it's one thing for the state to say they can regulate and tax a sale, but to use your dubious analogy, this is more like the state saying I can't have my neighbour over for a (free) dinner because I need a license in food preparation and it has to happen in a rented location.
> Try loading up some food you cooked in your kitchen and selling it out of your car, door-to-door, and watch what happens.
There's a lovely grandma in my neighborhood who has been doing exactly this for years. She sells the best tamales around. Just sayin'.
But yes, how viable and/or legal this is depends on where you live.
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> Unless we agree to fight for freedom everywhere, the only logical excuse is that the digital world doesn't have real world consequences, except that it increasingly patently does now.
I think the relevant difference is that it has real-world consequences for other people. And the consequences are likely to scale with the magnitude of the audience, meaning that it is bigger players that should face stiffer regulation. And yes, I think some of the examples you give should also be allowed.
Catalytic converters are there because they reduce the emissions your car produces. Those emissions get out into the air and affect everyone around you, and (over time, potentially) everyone on the planet. Rules around selling baked goods exist to ensure you don't sell bread made with rotten eggs or something that would make people sick. (And there are now "home kitchen" laws in some places that do allow you to do this anyway.) Installing a new electrical outlet has potential fire risks which could affect nearby buildings. Building a deck has potential safety consequences, but I imagine there are many jurisdictions where you can do that without a permit, and even more where you can get away with doing so even though it's technically not allowed.
Me installing a tic-tac-toe game from F-droid doesn't have the same kind of ripple effects on other people. It probably has much smaller such effects than installing a mainstream app like Facebook.
> Unless we agree to fight for freedom everywhere, the only logical excuse is that the digital world doesn't have real world consequences, except that it increasingly patently does now. It's no surprise to me then that the argument does not resonate. That does mean we may have to allow people to have an uncomfortable level of freedom, across the board, in order to be logically consistent.
The bigger you are, the more everything you do affects other people. To my mind the "logically consistent" approach is to impose greater restrictions on almost all sorts of behavior the larger and more powerful the entity performing the behavior. By this logic, it would be Google that is restricted from changing its policy like this, simply because it is big.
Google is very clear, sideloading has about 50x more malware than the Play Store. The Brazilian government in particular is absolutely furious about the amount of scams, and was openly planning legal interventions.
Your ability to distribute your app anonymously absolutely meets the definition of real-world consequences for other people.
I personally find it absurd we accept that the government regulates food (people can't detect bad food), and hair cutting (people can't detect inexperienced people with scissors), but the right to anonymous app distribution is sacrosanct, as though food quality is less transparent than app quality. It's not - all of these licenses need to be let go of on the small scale.
Why would you take them at face value? Just look at the Play Store yourself. I've seen plenty of privacy-invading (and worse!) apps on the Play Store, even when (especially when!) searching for a specific app I know is legit and good.
Meanwhile I can download anything with confidence on F-Droid, the subject of the article.
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How is "50x" measured? Is that number of apps or number of app installs? Are they considering things like Facebook and TikTok as "malware"?
They way they implement the rules also removes the most trustworthy apps. Seems like a bad trade.
> Google is very clear, sideloading has about 50x more malware than the Play Store.
The butcher says that vegetables is bad for your health, and you should only eat meat.
Google is full of shit.
There are plenty of physical appliances you can modify how ever you want because it's really only your business. Installing the software of your choice on a phone is like that. It's not something like a car sharing a public road and polluting the air.
A compromised phone could be used in a botnet, and might even cripple the cellular infrastructure itself with a DDoS attack.
And if I compromise your Apple Watch, I can reprogram the baseband firmware into a radio jammer! We can never allow arbitrary code execution on that device for the safety of the public!
I think your lack of reasonable example speaks for itself.
What real world consequences occur from installing whatever software you choose on your device?
people might watch movies they haven't paid for. people might read books they're not supposed to read. people might start having ideas that the oligarchs don't approve of. it's terrifying!
You can do whatever you want to do with your car, your kitchen, or your home. There is nothing a manufacturer can do to stop you. But you can't demand that they help you and provide you with assistance. Likewise, you can do exactly whatever you want with your iPhone or Android phone. You can rip out the chips and put in different chips, if you have the talent to do it. But you can't demand that the manufacturer helps you.
Are you trying to further normalize the situation?
I said it was inconsistent to fight for digital freedoms without real world freedoms. I did not say I was okay with the loss of digital freedoms.
I think people should be able to build a deck without state consent. I think people should be able to sell to their neighbors without the health department watching. I think people should be able to start a small business without needing IRS filings at first. I think a small business might need OSHA exceptions across the board for the first few employees. I even think, yes, that allowing some idiots to roll coal is worth more than tightly regulating car repairs and controlling car repair equipment. And I think, to most people, these freedoms matter more than digital sovereignty.
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Edit, posting too fast, cannot reply directly: In that case, that's a great argument for regulating app distribution, we need to protect people from scam apps. We can't possibly neglect people who don't know better about the risks of sideloading.
I'm sure you wouldn't say, "I just want to do whatever I want with code, while stopping my neighbor from building a dangerous deck," with a straight face, right?
The particular problem with your kind of thinking is neglecting people are assholes.
It's cool and all for your neighbors to sell you raw milk until that case of brucellosis and staph kills off the breadwinner in your family and you're caught up for the rest of your life suing a family farm out of existence.
And that deck is great and all, until you go over to your buddies party where you're all drinking and 15 crowd on to that deck that suddenly fails leading to you being a paraplegic.
And small business OSHA exceptions are great until big companies sub out all their work to tiny contractors that end up dying without proper PPE.
And some idiot rolling coal is fine until you're the one trying to figure out how you got lung cancer even though you didn't ever smoke.
Libertarianism is what happen when you don't think in systems.
You are mixing up legitimate government regulations with a corporation abusing it's power to fuck over consumers.
Following your rationale, we just actually need the government to step in and regulate that Google cannot do what they want with Android.
Since I live in the EU, that's exactly what I am hoping for.
> You are mixing up legitimate government regulations with a corporation abusing it's power to fuck over consumers.
Anytime similar argument is brought up for Apple, people always say "Their platform, their rules". Isnt that the case here?
> Anytime similar argument is brought up for Apple, people always say "Their platform, their rules". Isnt that the case here?
Apple told users in advance that they would be buying into a walled garden.
Google, on the other hand, fraudulently marketed Android as open.
Fraud is illegal. Walled gardens are not.
I think both Apple and Google should be able to set their own rules if they're just acting in self-interest. Some think they should be regulated due to being a duopoly, I disagree, but at the same time it's a reasonable argument to make.
Government crackdown is the scarier thing. It's suspicious seeing both "private" companies locking things down, while at the same time the US govt is increasingly making special threats and deals with big corps, and also Europe is trying to clamp down on encrypted messaging. So yeah the outcry over Android seems justified. Wouldn't be surprised if WEI comes back too.
I cannot speak for other people. You can look up my comment history on similar discussions if you so desire.
My position when Apple was throwing a hissy fit because of EU regulations is that Apple should go fuck itself.
Now, likewise, I hope the EU assrapes Google with fines if they move on with this bullshit.
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A libertarian who somehow also wants rigid restrictions on technology? Did someone steal your crypto or something?
I find this position hard to reconcile.