[KaiserPro]

The people that operated looms in cotton mills used to say the same thing. A guard would get in the way, It slows me down when I try to do x. "I'm a skilled technician, just let me have access"

They'd keep saying that until they lost a hand, arm, leg to the big swirling mass of metal.

[andrepd]

Apples and oranges. Installing an encrypted chat app, a torrent client, or an open source OS stripped of spyware will not mangle my limbs, but big tech and governments are hard at work trying to make these a thing of the past.

People on hn would do well to stop giving cover to such disastrous pretenses.

[KaiserPro]

context:

> I do NOT want to be "protected".

to which you replied:

> Installing an encrypted chat app,

on a thread about developers making sure that user data is safe.

I want to install an app, I don't want to scout around and make a value judgement to see if its going to steal all my data. In the same way that victorians had to work out if the local baker is cutting cheap flour with chalk or worse[1].

we are "qualified" to make that value judgement, the vast majority of people outside of this forum are not. This means that the longer we let predatory spyware run our ecosystem (lets be honest, most of the "internet" is paid for by google, facebook and apple et al) the longer we ingrain in people to expect to be exploited.

The solution is not only opensource, because frankly thats even more user hostile. (oh you lost your entire history? lol you should have done x,y,z and not pressed the "make it awesome" button, as if you'd read the code you know its in. alpha) The solution is as "the people" to demand safe software. This won't happen because the current tech giants are the only reason why US GDP is growing.

The solution is tackling the tech behemoths. But that wont happen with current US system.

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-25259505

[IAmBroom]

Relevant xkcd. https://xkcd.com/327/