That's what we do in every other domains, what's the difference here ?
We need to drop the attitude that technology is a new scary thing it's not. Technology is an extension of our selves we have been using it for thousands of years to expand our ability.
Pen and paper was the old technology if you don't know how to use it you are illiterate, if you don't know how to use the new technology you are still just illiterate.
The baby boomer attitude of "I can't be arsed to improve as a person so every one else has to dumb it down for me" is unacceptable.
Do you apply that to yourself out of tech ? Are you literate in art, philosophy, astrology, history, chemistry, medicine, &c. (more than surface knowledge) ? Where do you draw the line ? Is using google maps without knowing how the GPS system works in details an issue ? What about cooking ? Do you know which chemical reactions create tastes ? Are you buying food from supermarkets, why don't you hunt and grow your own ?
> The baby boomer attitude
As if millennials+ were better. Using a pc/smartphone daily doesn't mean you're tech literate, it's a prime example of familiarity != knowledge.
Same reasoning for forcing people to have their cars serviced by mechanics and not do their own maintenance in their backyards. Otherwise we'd have people driving cars without pipes and DIY break pads. I'd much rather have that enforced by megacorps/govt than by an infinite amount of businesses/individuals trying to game the system.
For most people a smartphone is an entertainment device, a tool at best, they don't give a single fuck about the underlying tech and they should not. Feel free to root your phone and install whatever you want, you can't ask people to become tech literate, it's your hobby/job, not their. Our job is to provide them safe tools, not teach them about tech. Look at your own life, chances are you don't even have surface knowledge of 99% of the things you use daily, and that's perfectly fine, nobody expects you to be a furniture designer, building safety inspector and car mechanic.
As a service tech if I fill a car with tomato sauce instead of oil I pay for the car.
As a programmer I can sell all the users data, leak it to hacks, then laugh all the way to the bank.
As a furniture salesman I can requirements on materials transparency. If I break those I'm liable.
As a programmer I can totally change the rules of my application at any time.
If society wants to trust tech it will have to hold it's creators responsible.
The back door encryption thing is a fun example of this.
For the record, I do my own break pads. And have done the master cylinder (thing that powers the breaks) on my cars a couple of times. Not just without formal training. Without any training except what I could quickly Google.
Not sure why you would assume that prohibiting people from working on their cars would increase the level of maintenance.
> And what does having to follow the law have to do with any of this
Google is free to handle its playstore as it please as long as it follow the law, I doubt google will pull a genocide anytime soon. Setting boundaries/rules doesn't make you an authoritarian regime. If you want to pull the "this reminds me of the darkest hours of our history" card you better find something more important than an app removal from a mobile phone app store if you want to be taken seriously. But I guess it's fashionable these days to compare everything to nazi germany/fascism/_insert_bad_people_, no matter how convoluted the comparison is.
Can you quote where I said anything about a "regime"?
> Google is free to handle its playstore as it please as long as it follow the law,
Which is true, but completely besides the point? I am free to call you a clueless asshole. But if the discussion is about how to have a constructive dialog, me pointing out that I am free to call you a clueless asshole contributes exactly nothing to the conversation and at best shows that I have no clue what the discussion is about.
> I doubt google will pull a genocide anytime soon.
Your point being? Authoritarianism is good when it's not a genocide, because ... ?
> Setting boundaries/rules doesn't make you an authoritarian regime.
Again: Where did you pull that "regime" from? And also, no, "setting boundaries/rules" does not make for authoritarianism, that is correct. Why did you assume that I wasn't aware of that?
> If you want to pull the "this reminds me of the darkest hours of our history" card you better find something more important than an app removal from a mobile phone app store if you want to be taken seriously.
Why? And no, simply pointing out that one thing is worse than the other is not a relevant argument, that's simply straw manning, because noone claimed that one was as bad as the other.
But, you can't really provide them safe tools without fixing some of the behavioral components, can you.
"Don't try to lick the sharp parts, especially when running the machine" is an implicit and important (albeit obscure) part of the safety to operating, let's say, a band saw. Unfortunately, the intellectual bar seems to be noticeably higher for "When a very urgent and heavily accented Microsoft Support representative calls you out of the blue, don't type into your shiny techno-thingy what they tell you to".
I'm generally all for sane defaults and constructing to make spontaneous use possible too, but a lot of the time there is ultimately no other protection against dangerously wrong use of tools than not using the tools dangerously wrongly. Too bad that's a tall order for very complicated machines that can do vastly different things depending on configuration.
I know people are going to quote Heinlein here, but civilisation exists so that not everybody has to be a specialist in everything.