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Comment by Nikker | Hacker News Reader

An interesting question, if Nokia informed their customers before the purchase would they have still bought the hardware? It's not really quite as altruistic of Nokia they don't put the cards firmly on the table before hand.

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Do they have to educate their customers as to the meaning of terms like "SSL" and "encryption" as well? Otherwise many won't know what to make of it.

Simple analogy: Dealer wants to sell you a car, but requires installation of an internal monitoring camera.

How is this in any way analogous to the Nokia situation? Nokia aren't passing traffic through their proxy because they want access to your data, they're doing it because your device isn't powerful enough to perform the necessary computations itself.

It's a privacy concern as it is. Please don't muddy the waters by spreading FUD and conflating this with something it's not.

Lets say I run a mail forwarding service. I get your permission to go to each of your mail boxes and send your mail to where ever you happen to be. Mail is heavy though and to save you money I open all your mail remove a couple of pages / brochures / ads, reseal it in the original envelope and don't tell you.

I promise I don't read your mail when I get caught.

I'm giving the first 3 months free, please provide your information below so I can get started today!

Dealer wants to sell you a car, but installs an internal monitoring camera to do maintenance in order to see the condition of the roads you drive on. But doesn't tell you.

Nokia is a company run by big men and women they could very well come up with an analogy.

Saying it's OK to not tell someone something important because you don't respect the intelligence of the person or people it considers is well, wrong.

If they don't want to be accused of MitM, the onus is on them to spell it out as to why Nokia's "browser" isn't as safe as a normal browser.

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