[ben_w]

> After all, if you can research and understand the implications of application and messaging security, you can probably make a better living working at an IT desk somewhere than you can from stealing cars

I doubt that. I think the main thing keeping cars safe from the 1% or so who don’t care about the law or ethics of theft is that it’s almost impossible to get away with it. Those with the relevant skill and the willingness to be criminals probably just take an easier approach, like card skimming.

This belief is based on how much second hand cars are worth and therefore how few cars a thief would need to steal each month for a very big salary.

[bloak]

I think you can get away with it, if you know what you're doing, but a stolen car is worth a lot less than the same car sold second-hand legitimately. Probably you either have to sell it to someone who knows it's stolen, knows not to take it anywhere near a legitimate service centre, and is prepared to forfeit it if stopped by the police, or you break it up and sell the parts, or you have a way of smuggling it out of the country to somewhere where they don't care about where cars came from.

[josephg]

Right; and this was my point in the first place. The police don't have to make it impossible to get away with stealing a car. They just need to make it difficult and awkward. Thats still enough to massively disincentivized car theft - which in turn has resulted in far fewer cars being stolen.

Likewise if they ban end-to-end encrypted chat apps from the app stores, I bet that would decimate the number of people who used them. Even if anyone could just get an android phone and sideload signal, in practice adoption would still fall low enough to make law enforcement happy. Even amongst criminals.