The superhuman efforts that folks on HN make to find technical workarounds and solutions is wonderful to see, but we must realize that this is not a technical problem. It's a social and legislative one. It can't be fought on technical grounds. The push back has to be via putting pressure on politicians by making regular people more aware.
Right now, the vast majority of users are being bombarded with a one sided narrative of how 'insecure' their devices are. They read almost everyday about someone losing their life's savings due to 'hackers'. In this environment, they genuinely believe locking down their devices will make them more secure and prevent them from being 'hacked'.
The powers that be make sure that the people never hear the other side. That people are giving absolute control to large corporations. In my experience, once the issue is framed as 'Google will decide what you can do with your phone' every single person is immediately outraged.
If you want to make a meaningful contribution, however small, then make it a point to educate people about the control they are giving to large corporations like Google. It doesn't take much to convince them that Google et al don't have their best interests in mind. They already know it and have experienced it. The second thing to do is to encourage them to reach out to their member of congress via letters. It's easy enough to do, and politicians are terrified of going against voters. They rely on people's ignorance to quietly work against their constituent's interests while supporting whichever special interest happened to donate the most to their campaign fund.
The biggest mistake is that people trusted a company that, in reality, isn't that different from Apple. Just because everyone claimed Android as the true open source alternative to iOS, when only AOSP was that.
Google (before the sell-off) promoted a morality in 'don't be evil' that was a stark contrast to other tech firms. The adverts they carried were minimal. Their "free" stuff was top of the line, better than people were getting from paid services.
Apple (under Jobs) sold themselves as counter-culture, they used popstars (unironically), and design, to sell the idea that if you were your own person, or followed fashion, then you bought Apple.
I think the goodwill from those days still provides the foundations of their cultural position now. Although they chip away at those foundations.
OpenAI looked like it could follow Google's early model, until it didn't.
The writing was on the wall for "don't be evil" when Google started the process of acquiring the much reviled DoubleClick back in 2007, nearly 20 years ago at this point. That's longer than most people reading this have been in the tech industry; a generation has never seen Google be anything other than increasingly extractive and monopolistic.
They built products people like, and specially Apple has good reputation for building reliable, long-lasting and easy to use stuff for most people, leading to a heavy user adoption. But heavy user adoption without the proper regulation and company ethics leads to, well, monopolistic practices.
i mean Apple kind of used that position for building a good reputation. their whole thing is/was how secure their devices were and how they had human verification on all apps that went through the app store with a clear intents file (a file the describes exactly WHY an app needs permission for bluetooth/etc), and a secure enclave that prevented even the FBI from getting in (while apple refused to give them a backdoor). Hackers and tinkerers will find a lot of these measures to be an annoyance and authoritative control, but a lot of people just want their phone to a product, not the user.
> Google now pulls the rug on Android which is a whole different story because it used to be open. The whole idea of Android was to be open.
This is the narrative for us in developed nations, but the majority of users today are people who were in developing countries and got a mid-tier smartphone to chat with friends and do banking with the same values as Apple users.
> Because Apple always did this, everybody knew this and people buy Apple exactly because of this.
Is that really so? Does the average iPhone user actually factor the app store tax into their decision to purchase the device? Or do they just assume that is just how all software works because they have no exposure to software ecosystems outside the iPhone app store
> Does the average iPhone user actually factor the app store tax into their decision to purchase the device?
As I'm the IT tech support for some family members, I certainly do. A lot less drama and garbage when using Apple products (generally speaking).
I've sysadmined Linux for a living for many moons now, and used to run Linux and then FreeBSD at home, and I switched to Apple for personal stuff during the PowerPC and early Mac OS 10.x timeframe because I did enough fiddling with tech at work and minimized it at home.
I used Linux desktops at work in the pre-COVID era when we still had offices and such. I now use a Apple laptop as I can get Unix-y tools to admin: I spend >80% of my time in Terminal (the rest in Safari and Mail).
They factor in a more "clean" appstore yes. Not the tax itself but they usually appreciate apple having more polished apps in general (given that the Google Playstore is full of trash).
Google play store is only full of trash if you go hunting for trash. I'd like to see the actual stats of people affected by play store malware vs malware available on the play store.
I'm not saying it's not a problem, but I am saying it's not a problem that has caused any problems with any Android user I've ever met.
I am not talking about the malware, I am talking about the apps that are bloated with advertisements or try really hard to push a subscription upon you. Lots of "free" apps try to push you into a subscription once installed.
this is that xkcd "regular people can only name a few common feldspars" meme. over 90% of consumers have no knowledge at all of tech corps' philosophy on user freedom, they just buy cheap phones that have good cameras and run instagram and tiktok well.
I agree with this. The general population is hopeless, they will hand literally anything away for the least amount of friction. They are also profoundly ignorant.
The solution should be to provide the tools necessary to preserve as much agency using technology to people who want to. You should also keep in mind the middle tier technical people who need a bit of hand holding. But do not waste your time on the general public because they don't share or comprehend your goals.
No, they calculate in the fact of that lack of control into their purchase decision. They mostly didn't want that control in the first place. They just want to _______, for many things you can fill in the blank, including things like look good, appear classy, get high, get laid...
I respectfully disagree with "they calculate in the fact of that lack of control into their purchase decision".
The average person is not calculating anything but price, is it what everyone else is using, is it new etc. Very low level calculations. They aren't asking "can I install applications from outside the app store?". Etc.
The average person is also being constantly manipulated to believe things which are actively nefarious are actually good for them.
I don’t know if we can blame the average person when there is an entire class of people which have almost limitless resources, knowledge and means to execute their agenda. At some point we have to accept we are fighting against an evil and powerful enemy. And that the masses are high succeptible
It’s like being mad at the characters in lord of the rings for succumbing to the rings powers
Hrrm. It seems your original comment has been heavily edited.
> They aren't asking "can I install applications from outside the app store?"
I agree. They don't want to. They already can't begin to evaluate app trustworthiness and don't want to have to. And they shouldn't have to. Yet they live in a world where they do. So they lean on reputation, app store filtering, the legal system, and hope.
That's not what the parent was saying. Most people don't have any opinion whatsoever on sideloading. You can go confirm this for yourself by asking a Mac or PC owner how scary it is. Most of them will respond that they genuinely never thought about it, not that they're afraid to consider it. To these people, it's a normal feature of their device that you could never remove.
The parent is lamenting that people don't care about this technology - Client Side Scanning, hardware attestation, Push notification surveillance - all of it is enabled not because of fear, but apathy.
> And they shouldn't have to. Yet they live in a world where they do.
This is fearmongering logic that doesn't really defend the App Store. Putting your faith in a centralized software auditor also requires you to pay attention and stay abreast of scams. It's just a different exploit chain to deliver the same payloads: https://blog.lastpass.com/posts/warning-fraudulent-app-imper...
I do talk to computer users and they do fear making installations. Many of them have installed something that was adware or a virus, often without meaning to and regretted the results. I have been helping my family and extended family members fix their errors for a long time. This pushes them to big names with names to spoil.
I suspect that the GP is, as you write, lamenting the lack of attention to the topic.
> This is fearmongering logic that doesn't really defend the App Store
I agree it doesn't defend the app store. It wasn't about the app store at all. It is about the social problem of the persistent existence of people who choose to purposely do others harm. The problem for most people isn't the app store but those who attempt to get exploits and quasi-exploits into the app stores.
I also agree that you still have to be cautious when using the app stores. Are you claiming that the app store controls do nothing to reduce the presence of malicious apps in their stores? The article you link starts by noting that the app was removed the day after that post was made. That is exactly why people feel more comfortable using the app store.
> the app was removed the day after that post was made
LastPass has been downloaded in excess of 50 million times in the past 10 years. As many as 10,000 users could have installed the app and turned over their credentials to the trojan version in a 24 hour period. If your manual review takes a day to respond, it's already too late at Apple's scale.
> That is exactly why people feel more comfortable using the app store.
Then why does the App Store represent the minority of software sales on platforms like macOS, where users are given free reign to download whatever they want? It seems like users are overwhelmingly uncomfortable sticking to the App Store, if you take their actions and spending into account.
Apathy seems to be the best explainer here. Users don't care about security at all, they are just consuming whatever is put in front of them. That's why social engineering like LastPass works, and it's why you see people ignore systemic backdoor efforts like Client Side Scanning and Push notifications. They might be afraid of getting hacked, but it's plainly clear that none of them care enough to make a change in their lifestyle.
I would have expected Apple to catch that on review. That was a egregious failure and betrayal of trust on their part. I wonder if they took any responsibility for the consequences of their error.
I'd agree if you wrote that most users don't understand security at all, that users aren't really given the tools they need to maintain security, or that exploits are designed to target people's vulnerabilities. You seem to be blaming the victims of motivated (sometimes) advanced actors. Even serious engineers have been phished for NPM publishing access.
Yes, but most people don't realize it, simply because they have been conditioned from the beginning that the only way to run anything on an iOS device is via the app store.
With Apple customers, a better argument to make is to say that Apple applies a 30% 'tax' on all activity on their phones. That they are being forced to pay more compared to non Apple users in spite of having bought their device fair and square.
Developers may or may not pass on the fees to customers, but as a user I'm not forced to pay anything and it definitely doesn't apply to all activity on the phone. I pay the same for Netflix as any Android user does. My cell bill wouldn't drop 30% by switching to Android. When I buy something at Amazon I'm not paying more than you.
Also, you're overestimating the fees. Few apps or services hit the 30% threshold or stay there for long (the fee for subscriptions drops in the second year).
The real problem IMHO is Apple taking a significant amount out of developer pay checks. Users are fine. The impact is on developers.
I have been using Apple devices for almost 20 years, and I have never been forced to pay a 30% tax on all activity on my phone. I can avoid it by buying directly from the seller's website, and also I just avoid buying software subscriptions in general, but especially from the App Store.
99% of the payment activity I do on my phone (buying retail goods, travel arrangements, paying invoices) has no additional cost.
You still suffer, because developers who don't want to pay the Apple tax on their apps simply avoid the App Store. You have no access to many good apps at all. Including FLOSS.
Web apps are indeed better, unless you need an access to hardware, fast computation or similar. But Apple is against web apps, so you're right to abandon them.
How many users actually care about those? Convincing customers to fork over money for an app at ALL is like pulling teeth.
The only things I’d really miss on a phone ecosystem is like, game emulation and some more esoteric network data/file management functions. These are things that are almost inherently outside the range of interests for the vast majority of people and the main reason they’re restricted is because they’re so piracy adjacent that it’s basically impossible to extricate them from association with a whole bunch of technically illegal use cases.
Little wonder then, that both the App Store proprietor AND App Store vendors would have an interest in locking those out to maintain the health of that platform as a viable place to run a business through.
Buying apps is hardly "all activity on a phone". It's completely inconsequential to my spend since summer of 2008, when I began using Apple products. Maybe a couple hundred dollars in total app store purchases? It would make no sense for me to base a decision about devices I use day and night over that small amount of money (30% of a couple hundred dollars).
> It would make no sense for me to base a decision about devices I use day and night over that small amount of money (30% of a couple hundred dollars).
Fair enough. It might not be consequential for you, the fact remains Apple took 30% of every dollar you spent on the app store. This, after you paid a premium for Apple hardware. I'm happy the walled garden with a toll is worth it for you. All I'm saying is, others might not agree with that if they knew. Just look at the push back again tariffs as an example.
You're correct. You've just paid it on every app store purchase, and every in app purchase. That's because Apple, despite trying, have failed to completely lock in the payment infrastructure.
I consider almost everyone really wants to earn more money, more easily.
I do not see any indication that Apple wants to get involved in adjudicating payment disputes for physical goods and services. That is high cost, high liability, low margin work. They seem to be perfectly happy letting the existing banks (aka card issuers) handle that, and getting a 0.15% cut for allowing their credit cards to use Apple Pay.
Apple has restricted themselves to being the payment infrastructure for only digital goods, and I assume that is because that is the cheaper, more scalable option.
As a side note, in the US, the proportion of sellers willing to eat the credit card fees has gone down every year, and seemingly at an accelerating pace. I have winnowed down my credit card usage to retail goods/restaurants/travel, because almost everyone else wants payment via ACH/Debit/Zelle/other option that avoids credit card fees, so I would be surprised if Apple would ever want to enter this market, given that even the 2% credit card fee transactions are not able to compete.
> It doesn't take much to convince them that Google et al don't have their best interests in mind. They already know it and have experienced it.
I think with Apple in particular, this is the issue. Apple have largely demonstrated that they _do_ often have the users best interests in mind (or at least at some point have had) on the basis that the users are Apple’s primary customers. Yes, Apple lock down iOS functionality but this has often been to deliver innovative features. Users don’t mind that they’re in a walled garden because, they like the walled garden.
This is where Google is a different case. Google’s interests are aligned with mass data collection rather than products people love. Most Google users have experienced how this impacts them negatively at some point, usually with the degradation of their products, and constant advert spam.
Google is an example of a company that the mass majority assumes to be in the wrong. Apple often isn’t.
Most people just do not think about this as much as we do.
We understand that, as the saying goes, if you're not paying for something then you are the product.
But less technical people don't consider that, and don't have hoards of technical friends to convince them otherwise. They just think: they using the product, so they're the user, right? We know that's true but it's not the same thing as customer. Most people don't have that distinction in their head.
It's even partially true that Google does want to do things that attracts and retains users, because that's a prerequisite for selling them to advertisers. In my experience, that's an upper bound on the amount of thought most non-technical people would give it.
Apple is the classic “good king”. By and large they have used their power in ways that benefit users. Other than enriching apple, there’s been no direct or apparent harm to the end user from the walled garden. I know that is a controversial point, but harms we don’t ever know about are pretty hard to get upset about.
But the “good” king never lasts. They’re always eventually replaced by a despot, and all the power you ceded to the “good” king falls into the hands of the bad king. Which is why ceding that power is a bad idea, and kings are a terrible system of government.
For one thing, Apple has tended to focus on privacy at the expense of profit. Apple could certainly be monetizing all of their user data. Now more than ever. It's not just businesses that want your data to sell you stuff, it's the hyperscalers wanting to funnel it into AI training.
Apple is not perfect, by any means. I recently had a conversation with a former Apple employee about how they employ differential privacy internally. This former employee was upset about Apple's interpretation of one parameter ("privacy budget"), but the fact that we're having this conversation at all is a positive. Google, despite being an early adopter of differential privacy, is on the other side of the privacy spectrum: virtually everything they provide is intended to capture what you do on- or off-line.
I will pay a premium for Apple stuff for this, and other reasons. I do wish they were more developer-friendly, however. Enough so that every time I buy a new computer I have to run through the mental calculus of whether I'd rather fight with the cathedral or the bazaar. I recently bought a new computer and the cathedral won the last round.
In this case i am using “good” to mean “not actively hostile towards users”. Yes they are more expensive, but many people are happy to pay a premium to get a premium product. Like going to a fancy restaurant and getting good food. Google’s version is like going to a less-fancy restaurant and getting less-good food but also they sell photos of you eating to TMZ.
Their business model revolves around people to choose to pay them for products, which aligns them with customer interests on a fundamental level. They have to work within those constraints when they engage in lock-in chicanery
Most of the other big tech companies make their revenue from other companies paying them to leverage the influence they have over their users. So they are not constrained in the same way.
I believe that most Googlers are pretty aligned with the principles of the HN crowd, but Google the machine is not.
> Apple already does this and practically no one is outraged
Apple ran a very successful propaganda campaign where they portray themselves as the protectors and enforcers of a secure environment where users are safe from attacks from the wild internet. See Apple's spin on blocking cookies. Therefore, users of Apple products are conditioned to believe these measures exist for their own personal benefit, unlike Google which is presumed to be motivated to abuse your trust.
> In my experience, once the issue is framed as 'Google will decide what you can do with your phone' every single person is immediately outraged.
I've had a lengthy debate about this (in the context of right-to-repair) with a friend of mine who's outside tech and he genuinely held (still holds?) the opinion that the manufacturer has the "right" to decide how their products are used. I'm willing to bet that this is a common viewpoint of people outside the tech sphere, they just want a device that "works", which for them is essentially just "I can use apps from the App store".
> 'm willing to bet that this is a common viewpoint of people outside the tech sphere, they just want a device that "works", which for them is essentially just "I can use apps from the App store".
Perhaps some people were just conditioned to believe that these shackles are forced upon them for their own good, because only bad people would ever want to take them off.
Seriously, finding bootlickers aren't hard. The better question to ask is how many voters are bootlickers and that typically hovers around 20-30%, so the follow-up question should be what type of platform could capture the remaining 70-80% of the electorate?
Turns out right to repair laws are very popular with voters and small business owners. Maybe we all start to tread down that path more and figure out what sorts of regulations pressures companies into adopting open standards?
I mean I agree with you. But also, it's not that unreasonable of an opinion. As long as it's coupled with optionality, which I think is the actual issue. Well the actual "issue" is that most people don't care or think that much at all about it. HN is a very special crowd.
For people who are just technology consumers they don’t see what could be offered, only what is. This is so frustrating when one understands how railroaded everyone is into maximizing platform ad revenue while holding the reasons people go on the platforms out as a carrot on a stick that gets further and further away. It’s 300 PHD psychologists vs someone just trying to keep up with their family.
I just submitted a survey to my state's DMV to encourage them to ditch reCAPTCHA. I went to renew my plates and had to do almost a dozen "click the picture" screens to get through on IronFox on my GrapheneOS phone the other day. Luckily no QR code with the whole Play Integrity check, but that wouldn't have been out of the realm of possibility.
There is a tradeoff between the freedom users have on their devices on one side, and the likelihood less sophisticated users will get their information stolen or their devices pwned and used to DoS innocent websites on the other side.
If you don't address this tradeoff you're not really engaging the issue.
What I think we need is a professional, well-informed advocate of freedom who is willing to seriously discuss the tradeoff and concede that neither extreme is ideal.
> What I think we need is a professional, well-informed advocate of freedom who is willing to seriously discuss the tradeoff and concede that neither extreme is ideal.
There is no shortage of well informed advocates of freedom. The question is, which forum should they discuss this in? There is no meaningful forum for such a debate which will have any real effect on policy and that's by design.
The only place that can both debate and effect policy changes in the legislature and politicians will never take the people's side against corporations on an issue until they fear losing reelection.
Hence the ask to educate the people around you and to encourage them to reach out to their representatives.
Sadly much as I agree with OP, the reality is there are a lot of evil people, and some of them lead a country and thus have vast resources to attack with. We need to solve this problem, not just cry about what a few of us are losing.
> If you want to make a meaningful contribution, however small, then make it a point to educate people about the control they are giving to large corporations like Google.
This is a fool's errand. We live in a time without virtuous values, where convenience is king. The masses don't care about cookies or consent, they accept all. They only understand direct punishment.
It is absolutely not. Awareness is what people need right now because nobody is saying anything different then the established line. The more people that put there voice into this, the better off we are going to be.
I'm hosting a Surveillance Capitalism Presentation soon that I designed myself, I'll likely post it on the net when I am done. If you are interested in hosting a zoom call or an in person awareness campaign like this. Email me from my website[0] campaign form[1] and ill notify you when its online and you can download it and use it yourself to host your own venue.
Generalizing like this is a fool's errand, if anything. We care, and we are part of the "masses". If this is something you care about, share with others: there will be those who value it.
HN is NOT part of the “masses” in the sense “masses” is being used here.
A difference is being drawn between HN users who are interested in tech, and the everyone else. Most of humanity has little interest in Tech, and would rather spend their time on other things.
This also means they are less aware of ways to keep themselves safe, or less on top of whatever current threat is sweeping through the internet.
After multiple interactions on this site, I can say with some confidence that the average HN commenter does not have the same experience with technology that the average user does.
This divergence is resulting in different priorities and conversations.
I agree about HN being technically literate. I have non-technical friends that definitely care about privacy, their rights, maintaining a healthy economy, freedom in general. Then I have friends that don't really pay attention to that. I'm saying don't lump people into a single silly generalization.
Edit: I think that, given that us HNers often self-identify as tech priests, advocacy and education should follow naturally from that.
> The masses don't care about cookies or consent, they accept all. They only understand direct punishment.
Honestly, I can totally see where the cynicism is coming from, however if you think about it, that's a pretty condescending view. This effort might be Sisyphean, but things are not as dire as you might think.
People are already seething at how much their lives are being enshitified by Big Co. Even if 10% of voters reach out to their representatives, it would be a tidal wave. Politicians are terrified of the popular will and this is not a hill they are willing to die on. Just see the success of the right to repair movement as an example.
> Right now, the vast majority of users are being bombarded with a one sided narrative of how 'insecure' their devices are. They read almost everyday about someone losing their life's savings due to 'hackers'. In this environment, they genuinely believe locking down their devices will make them more secure and prevent them from being 'hacked'.
Nope. It's not the issue. The issue is people genuinely want the security problem to be solved by someone else. Either governments or big companies. So they can just not care about security once and for all.
If people were so aware of so-called hackers and how insecure their devices are, we would have seen people stopped installing apps on their phones and basically use it as a web browser. But that's not what happens. The opposite is truer: if you run an even slightly popular website you will receive feedback asking if you have an app version.
> In my experience, once the issue is framed as 'Google will decide what you can do with your phone' every single person is immediately outraged.
Is there a good primer on why this is bad? I know that it is on a technical level. But I havent heard anyone talk about in layman's terms Maybe I'll need to write something up. But it be great to have some resources as to why this is bad from a perspective other than my own.
I'm doing a presentation on Surveillance Capitalism soon and I might include this topic.
> The superhuman efforts that folks on HN make to find technical workarounds and solutions is wonderful to see, but we must realize that this is not a technical problem. It's a social and legislative one. It can't be fought on technical grounds.
This. No matter how good the intentions are, this represents the infrastructure that can be exploited to persecute individuals and groups and deprive them from the most basic rights.
And before anyone tries to downplay this as scaremongering, US legislators have introduced the legal framework to reject visas based on what comments the applicant may or may not have said in the past years regarding the current government.
I agree with the direction, but not the blind spot.
Your audience is going to shut you out if you don’t show you understand their reality.
I reach out to people, and every tech and media person I know, is holding sessions on government over reach and invasion of privacy, raising alarm bells.
Everyone not in tech, has just about had it with being predated upon, being screwed over and in general would rather warm themselves on a bonfire of tech stock, than do a thing to support it. Voters are HAPPY to see tech brought under control.
The degree of fraud, predation, privacy invasion that regular adults encounter, let alone children, is absurd.
To take the most civil and benign trend I know: online communities are dying to a glut of slop, bots, and spam. Users and mods are simply unable to keep up with this, and are increasingly likely to ding users as much as bots.
A majority of humanity, who live in the developing world, encounter even worse, AND have less recourse to support.
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Success in these things requires connecting with people. You cannot do that if you come across as a know it all.
You must open with an acknowledgement that Tech is not doing a good job for users, but giving governments sweeping powers is not the antidote.
I'm sure you're able to drive faster than the speed limit as well. The issue isn't whether technical circumvention is in the realm of possibility. The base issue here is that even so called 'democratic' governments seem to be copying the authoritarian playbook when it comes to cracking down on privacy online.
Debt, rather the lack of any via ble means for the US to pay back even a fraction of its debt without having the world's reserve currency.
Yes, theoretically they can always print their way out, but that's just default through inflation and bond yields will correct immediately to account for it.
Is that true though? People are currently forced to buy gas guzzlers since there are simply no practical and cheap EVs available in the United States. If Chinese EVs were allowed to be sold in the US, it's not a given that people would still prefer ICE cars.
Indeed, the fact that they are banned suggests that the Govt knows that the domestic car industry can't compete with them.
yeah … this is my take - Trump has pushed me to get an EV next time, and BYD is already killing it in UK. Only hope for continued EU car industry is to get the UK back in the single market (haha).
It's been discussed multiple times here before. The blunt reality is that
* Almost all of the productivity gains over the past three decades have been captured by the 1%(0.1% really). Rank and file workers (yes that includes tech workers) have seen a very minuscule portion of that. Tech got by for a while because the gains were so large and that for a while, the overall pie expanded faster than the growth in developers.
* The elites used the excess surplus to capture the govt(e.g Citizens United)and ensure favourable policy like being able to socialize losses and privatize profits which resulted in even more of the gains going to them.
* In search of ever increasing profits, the elites also funneled those gains into buying up more and more of the economy starting at the top (P.E driven consolidation) and increasingly moving lower and lower on Maslow's hierarchy (housing, food/farmland, medicine).
The lowest sections of our society started getting squeezed way before(notice where the most support for a promise to return to a 'glorious' past is), but it has now reached a point where even the upper middle class is getting squeezed and can't easily afford basic needs like housing and healthcare.
History shows that these situations are inherently unstable and don't last very long. Unfortunately for the elites, in the extreme cases they don't tend to do well in the aftermath once the proles decide they have had enough.
The best hope is that they voluntarily realize that the situation is untenable.
I guess they had to do the 'voluntary' bit as otherwise they are likely looking at a class action lawsuit claiming blatant age discrimination.
If you are eligible though, I wonder just how 'voluntary' the process actually is, esp if the company tells you that a PIP is coming otherwise (of course in a nice, legally defensible way)
Right now, the vast majority of users are being bombarded with a one sided narrative of how 'insecure' their devices are. They read almost everyday about someone losing their life's savings due to 'hackers'. In this environment, they genuinely believe locking down their devices will make them more secure and prevent them from being 'hacked'.
The powers that be make sure that the people never hear the other side. That people are giving absolute control to large corporations. In my experience, once the issue is framed as 'Google will decide what you can do with your phone' every single person is immediately outraged.
If you want to make a meaningful contribution, however small, then make it a point to educate people about the control they are giving to large corporations like Google. It doesn't take much to convince them that Google et al don't have their best interests in mind. They already know it and have experienced it. The second thing to do is to encourage them to reach out to their member of congress via letters. It's easy enough to do, and politicians are terrified of going against voters. They rely on people's ignorance to quietly work against their constituent's interests while supporting whichever special interest happened to donate the most to their campaign fund.
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