But this made me wonder: is there an history of people complaining about this sort of things and actually achieving something?
I think this might have happened with MSFT's hailstorm/passport, where in the end industry opposition meant the project was abandoned, but I can't recall other instances.
I'm really hoping this was just a team at Apple that got blinded by all the cool cryptography they came up with to solve a problem and that the higher ups will react if we screech loudly enough.
[1]: https://sneak.berlin/20201112/your-computer-isnt-yours/
How did they react? Isn't it still in effect? Still sending unencrypted messages when apps are opened?
As far as I'm aware, they plan on having OCSP encrypted, and plan on giving users a choice.
I honestly do not get the outrage over the apple's client side scanning. It's outrageous, sure, but... much of the same people seem to have been ok with unencrypted telemetry being transmitted for every executable run. Not to mention that every executable will also be logged at some point, so apple knows every program you've ever run.
One of the few tiny (and now seemingly completely void) victories I remember was the PIII processor serial number (1999): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10106870
Sure enough, over 72k votes at OneDrive's UserVoice [2] cause MSFT to back down. They still reduce the storage to 5GB, but existing users (myself included) can opt out of it.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2015/12/11/9890966/microsoft-onedri...
[2] https://onedrive.uservoice.com/forums/262982-onedrive/sugges...
The WASP did it to bring the browser vendors to comply to web standards, Netscape ans MS back then. In the EU you could make the case that user group lobbying influenced regulation.