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Comment by threatofrain | Hacker News Reader

Something troublesome to people who worry about privacy would be FB asking people to side-load, which in a sense they did when they bought a VPN and asked kids to grant all access to network traffic [1]. Kids will ignore warnings, and they are thought to be savvier than their folks. Kids are the ones who will download games that basically train you to love ads.

And Apple doesn't collect revenue from FB, but FB is probably the heaviest in its weight class. If FB asks, parents will say yes. If Fortnite asks, children will say yes.

[1]: https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/29/facebook-project-atlas/

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Parents would say yes to Facebook because it has a reputation. If Shadybook wants you to side load then you're not doing it because you don't know what it is, you don't already have an account outside of iOS garden, and likely will never hear about this company to even install it. It only works for Facebook because they are big enough to establish the relationship outside of Apple's walled garden.

I'm not sure what security concerns Fortnite might have either. It's a billion dollar game with a solid reputation. They're not going to start ringing up your credit card with fraudulent charges, and if they did then it would make the news and tarnish that reputation.

People interact with many companies outside of the iOS ecosystem just fine.

it's amazing to me how much imagination & concern people put in to 0.000001% of side loading cases.

if a computer is a bicycle for the mind, these people insist we go out fully padded, with front & back training wheels, walk our bikes up & down hills. never exceed 10mph or your eyeballs might pop out.

building a smarter culture able to avoid dangerous & bad forms of computing seems much more like the end I think we should spend time promoting. give people choice, visibility, and an ambient social network that can help provide background & discussion around the tech you've started dabbling in, that can warn you.

So, how much do you know about pharmaceuticals, building safety and cows?

We tightly regulate all those industries precisely so that people can rely on vendors and not get hurt, even if it might be more profitable to substitute a few components in a vaccine, skip the earthquake retrofit and ignore whatever animal disease popped up.

And this is without getting into the issues of oligopolies, network effects, vendor lock in and user manipulation/deception by vendors. The companies dedicate entire specialist teams worth of effort to this. The average person doesn't stand a chance without help.

IT in general is really not so special that it should be exempt from governmental consumer protection efforts. Especially since it is one of the most profitable sectors by far, so you really can't argue that there isn't room for tighter controls.

Apple and Facebook specifically are two of the most profitable companies in the world. They can afford it. And if they drop to "merely" being in the fortune 500, that is still completely fine with me. And if some exploitative business models become unprofitable, that's fine as well. That's kinda the point.

And before you argue that it would kill innovation: there is ample precedent for regulations that depend on the size of the company or the customer base.

I still see a computer more as a tool for freedom & exploration & less as a consumeable commodity or domicile. we use our will every second of our interactions with the computer, we pilot the tool through the information.

the premise that this experience must be built into a completely failsafe environment where the user has no possibility to ever do any harm to themselves is foolish. a pen if wielded improperly can hurt someone. but we don't regulate pens to make them utterly safe. and pens don't regulate what they will write.

the consumer does need protection, though, for sure. I don't see it as desirable that apple be the sole arbitrator of how their computers may be used though, as reasonable determiners of what parts of the internet we might connect to.

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