[evgen]

Apple can make a very good case that your vision of freedom is in opposition to privacy. By preventing certain things you categorize as 'freedom' Apple can provide stronger security and privacy protection, they can limit the ability of untrustworthy developers to sidestep protections, they can make it incredibly difficult to set up side-channels that leak privacy, and they can set OS-mediated protections of device info (GPS, etc) that are difficult to bypass.

The fact that this privacy protection happens to be in the financial interest of Apple pleases me, because they are unlikely to sell out long-term interests in protecting reputation for short-term gain in abusing my trust. This alignment of interests makes Apple a better guardian of my privacy, not worse.

[darawk]

> Apple can make a very good case that your vision of freedom is in opposition to privacy. By preventing certain things you categorize as 'freedom' Apple can provide stronger security and privacy protection, they can limit the ability of untrustworthy developers to sidestep protections, they can make it incredibly difficult to set up side-channels that leak privacy, and they can set OS-mediated protections of device info (GPS, etc) that are difficult to bypass.

None of that is true. All they need to do is create an opt-out mechanism to over-ride those security settings that requires authentication. It's trivial to have both, they just choose not to.

[evgen]

It is also trivial to convince technically unsophisticated users to over-ride these security settings to get some ephemeral (and probably not even true) benefit. On the front page of HN today was another story describing how Facebook harvested a large chunk of contact info and text messages because people _gave it permission to do so_ when the app asked for it. Expecting these same users to be sophisticated enough to know what they are actually opting out of in this case strikes me as being a bit delusional.

[darawk]

So make it difficult and explicit. Or shit, just don't go out of your way to make it impossible. Android threads this needle extremely well. Installing a different kernel is not something a casual user can be tricked into doing. It requires a restart, and a moderately complex sequence of clearly dangerous actions. There is no epidemic of people being 'tricked' into installing alternate Android kernels.