> 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.

Apple already does this and practically no one is outraged

> 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".

Petitions are also a good way of reaching out to people and explain the dangers of these issues. Many people that usually sign petitions are notified of new ones, and, as a generalisation, they are usually fairly against big tech.

If anyone knows of any european petition around this please share them with us

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.

> 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.

I think part of it is the hackers that the media reports on are entirely malicious. Most hackers aren't, we just like computers

> 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.

Oh boy, you're going to be really surprised.

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.

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