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Comment by Wowfunhappy | Hacker News Reader

Meanwhile, the Chinese government got Apple to ban VPN apps from the Chinese app store (and block the requisite API in sideloaded applications). So because of Apple's closed system, an entire nation of people is more liable to be spied on by their government.

But yes, let's encourage Apple to keep their system closed, to protect users from purposefully opting in to tracking.

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They can just buy an other phone. It's not like you HAVE to buy an iPhone.

Are you using china as a strawman to advocate for corporate userdata harvesting?

No. I'm not in favor of "corporate data harvesting", but I am in favor of users being able to run whatever software they want on devices they own. I firmly believe that this gives users more self-empowerement in the long run, and that China is a good example of why.

Trying to protect users from themselves is never a good solution. Educate, don't dictate.

The problem has always been, "what if you have users you can't educate?" (Or take too much time / effort to realistically educate, or don't want to be educated, etc.) If you have both groups of users, and they share a platform, and their security needs are at odds with each other, you have to pick either the educated group or the uneducated group, in a way which fundamentally disadvantages the unchosen group. You can't make both happy, ever.

In these debates I often see the educated group advocate for more education of the uneducated group, which many times I think is disingenuous, impractical, and sometimes even a little hostile to the uneducated. It seems to fundamentally misunderstand many of the uneducated group's wants and needs.

It's a bummer to be in the educated group and be subject to this problem, but I think it's fundamentally an intractable problem. If you don't like it, you have to leave for a platform which serves your needs, and that platform is almost certainly going to be a niche platform (at least eventually), because most users are not educated but want to have their needs served anyway.

EDIT: One more thing. There's an implicit assumption about danger here and an appropriate level of education. It's appropriate to ask anyone, regardless of who they are, to undergo a lot of training before operating, say, a car. It's not appropriate, in my book, to ask people to undergo a lot of education before operating a phone.

This isn't about ease of use! If Apple allowed sideloading software on the iPhone, nothing would change for 95+% of users, who would continue to get all their software from the App Store. Sideloaded software would be installed by only those users who were tech-literate enough to use such an option.

I brought up China because I legitimately see this issue as orthogonal to free speech. Here's another example: I'm not a fan of Alex Jones, and I'm glad he got banned from the App Store, but I'm less enthused that it's now impossible for Alex Jones to create an iOS app.

Imagine if we were talking about books instead of apps. If Barnes & Noble decided to ban books written by hate groups from their stores, I would be okay with that! I would not, however, be okay with Barns & Noble preventing hate groups from finding their own publishers and distributors. Software is the medium of our age, and so it needs to be possible for anyone to distribute.

This does not mean that sideloading software needs to be easy. Software is powerful, and users should be guided towards safe and well-vetted distributors. But if sideloading is impossible, you end up with the situation of VPN apps in China. If the alternative is that a handful of users who specifically ask to be tracked by Google and Facebook are in fact tracked by Google and Facebook, so be it.

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