Because it focuses on technical aspects and accepts the premise of 'age verification must be solved'. It doesn’t, and discretion what content and and what age children and teenagers can consume should be up to parents.

Not government, nor corporations.

it's the fact that fines are part of agency's income and it is their best interest(as a bureaucratic agency) to keep them at highest level where companies will still pay them.

Effectively this makes this a tax, enshittifying everything even worse.

if fines were decoupled from agencies, and had exponentially rising curve for repeat offenses, i think that would work better than ban, as much i would prefer for them to get banned.

and yet there's absolutely no evidence whatsoever that they've done this. The fines that have been levied are easy to pay.

why would we need to fund and make Europen Alternative to Surveilance (tm) when we could just you know - not have it at all?

Also fundamentally speaking - this does just take away your right to privacy. do you just let your rights be taken away?

I don't want 'minimization' of intrusion of privacy, i want no intrusion of privacy.

(Which is fine when the problem is bullshit and there is nothing to solve, which actually may be the case here.)

unless you want to argue semantics and go 'actually they're all part of technology', but that makes your argument even less meaningful.

Or, put another way, you cannot "just change culture", not any more than you can make a river flow uphill by pushing water with your hands. You can splash some water around and make a little puddle, but it'll quickly flow back to rejoin the river and continue on its way.

Culture is always seeking a dynamic equilibrium, in a landscape defined by economics and technology constraints. The only way to achieve lasting change is to change the landscape.

then you’re using different definition that everyone else, and bring nothing into discussion other than confusion.

>Or, put another way, you cannot "just change culture"

it isn't shaped just by technology. There are economic factors and cultural exchanges between different cultures.

This is purely tautological line of thinking, that brings nothing to discussion.

Literally repeating what I said.

> and cultural exchanges between different cultures.

What do you think distinguishes exchanges that are forgotten to those that achieve lasting change?

The instructor was a phd student who'd never been in industry.

He kept correcting me about industry practices, telling me that I had no idea what the real world was like.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bjuHQOgggxo

It's pointless, does not increase security, does increase complexity of every interaction, and introduces a lot of weird edge cases.

What i want is full anonymity enshrined in law, while at the same time giving parents, not governments, but parents, options to limit what their children can do on the internet.

It is also a matter of respect towards professionals. If civil engineer says that something is illegal/dangerous/unfeasible their word is taken into the account and not dismissed - unlike in, broadly speaking, IT.

PII isn't nearly as big a deal as a life tbh. I'd rather not gatekeep PII handling behind degrees. I want more accoubtability, but PEs for software seems like it's ill-suited for the problem. Principally, software is ever evolving and distributed. A building or bridge is mostly done.

A PR is not evaluated in a vacuum

I, as a self-proclaimed dictator of my empire, require, in the name of national security, all chat applications developed or deployed in my empire to send copies of all chat messages to the National Archive for backup in a form encrypted to the well-known National Archive public key. I appoint Professional Software Engineers to inspect and certify apps to actually do that. Distribution of non-certified applications to the public or other forms of their deployment is prohibited and is punishable by jail time, as well as issuing a false certification.

Sounds familiar?

The difference from civil engineering is that governments do not (yet?) require a remotely triggerable bomb to be planted under every bridge, which would, arguably, help in a war, while they are very close to this in software. They do something similar routinely with manufacturing equipment - mandatory self-disabling upon detecting (via GPS) operation in countries under sanctions.

It's my phone.

If you don't like their choices, you should be able to install other software you do like. There should be completely free options that people can choose if they desire. But the majority of people just want a working phone, that someone like Google is taking great pains to make work safely and reliably.

There is a difference between making a choice because there has to be something there (setting a default wallpaper, installing a default phone/sms app so your phone works as a phone) and actively choosing to act against the user (restricting what I can install on my own device, including via dark patterns, or telling me that I'm not allowed to grant apps additional permissions).

> For instance, should you be able to text message one million people at a time? You might want to, but Android doesn't offer that feature.

There's a difference between not implementing something, and actively blocking it. While we're at it, making it harder to programmatically send SMS is another regression that I dislike.

> Do you want to install spyware on your girlfriends phone? Maybe that's your idea of complete freedom, but the fact that Google makes it harder, is a good thing, not a bad thing.

Obviously someone else installing things on your phone is bad; you can't object to the owner controlling a device by talking about other people controlling it.

> If you don't like their choices, you should be able to install other software you do like. There should be completely free options that people can choose if they desire. But the majority of people just want a working phone, that someone like Google is taking great pains to make work safely and reliably.

Okay, then we agree, right? I should be able to install other software I like - eg. F-Droid - without Google getting in my way? No artificial hurdles, no dark patterns, no difficulty that they wouldn't impose on Google Play? After all, F-Droid has less malware, so in the name of safety the thing they should be putting warning labels on is the Google Play.

There are legitimate concerns being addressed by these feature restrictions.

IMO the way this should work is that Google can make their software however they want provided they don't do anything to stop me from changing it to work the way I want.

Unfortunately, they've already done a lot of things to stop me from changing it to work the way I want. SafetyNet, locked bootloaders, closed-source system apps, and now they're (maybe) trying to layer "you can't install apps we don't approve of" on top of that.

That's exactly how it is. You're free to get your soldering iron out, or your debugger and reverse engineer anything you want. I don't mean to argue unfairly, but all we're talking about here is the relative ease with which you can do what you want to do. How easy do they have to make it?

As for their software, as delivered, there are literally an infinite number of ways that it stops you from changing it. Maybe you want everything in Pig Latin, or a language you made up yourself. Do they have to design around this desire? Do they have to make this easy to do?

A couple decades ago it would have been impractical if not impossible to make a TV, sell it to a bunch of people, and then remotely update it a few years later to start showing unkippable manufacturer-installed video ads every time you power it on. Or create a car that requires you to pay money to the manufacturer every month in order to use the seat heaters. Or build a tractor that detects if you repair it using parts not made by a specific manufacturer and shuts itself off if you do.

But now, in the age of software, all of these abuses are not only feasible to implement, but easy. And it all comes down to the fact that the software that controls these devices cannot be easily modified by the user who purchased them, or by anyone other than the company that originally manufactured them. It's a local monopoly. Were software developers required to distribute the source and build tools along with the compiled code, I suspect a vibrant modding community would spring up around any product of sufficient popularity which would make such abuses much more difficult to get away with. (Why pay a monthly subscription for my seat heaters when I can just buy a $5 software mod that permanently enables them? And why bother developing such an anti-feature in the first place if you know users will easily bypass it?)

So you draw the line between the bootloader and the OS. Other people draw the line between the OS and applications. Most (nearly all) people can't write either, so for them it is just part of the device.

> you don't get to tell them how theirs should operate.

I paid for it, and I allow it to be legal in the jurisdiction I (partly) control. So it is not only theirs anymore.

If I tell someone to install a light switch in my living room and then it occasionally switches states when someone presses another switch at my outside wall and occasionally refuses working, I don't feel like they fulfilled their contractual obligation. Same with smartphones and software.

I would agree with you if I would want additional features, like if I want a filesystem, but there is no filesystem manager yet, or if I want to install a package, but there is no package manager, or the package manager uses another format. But here there is a package manager and the package has the right format, so I tell the device to install it and it just doesn't solely because I am called John Brown and not Alphabet Inc. . That is not right.

If the light switch you bought, has a little daylight sensor on it, and turns off when the sun is out, and that's what it does.. you may not like that light switch. You might want one that "does what you want, because you paid for it!" but then you should have purchased a different one, or made a light switch you actually liked. Of course you are free to get the soldering iron out, and try to change the light switch. But the manufacturer is under no obligation to make it easy for you to change the way it works.

That is fair, and right.

Not sure this analogy works as it gives prospective light switch buyers a choice of different light switch types. What google is doing seems more like forcing EVERY light switch to have daylight sensors, thus forcing you to save power (even if you're pro-global warming and just trying to do your part for the cause), then telling people with vision problems relating to suboptimal indoor illumination or suffer from sunlight frequency melting disorder or think they've got some other random "daylight makes life suck" bullshit to create a student/hobbyist account.

I don't think the distinction exists the way you're trying to describe. If I should be allowed to install any software I want, surely that includes any .apk I want? Conversely, someone could make the exact claim one step down the chain and argue that you don't get to tell them how their firmware should work and if you want to install your own OS you should just go buy a fab, make your own chips, write your own firmware, and make your own phone. And that's absurd, because users should be allowed to run their own software without being forced to ditch the rest of the stack for no reason.

And the argument is the same lower down the stack. You shouldn't be able to tell someone how to design their firmware.

The only problem is where the law prohibits us from trying to undo these restrictions, or make modifications ourselves. It's government that restricts us, and we should focus our efforts there.

> And the argument is the same lower down the stack. You shouldn't be able to tell someone how to design their firmware.

Earlier, you claimed,

> They should be able to install any software they want.

but it sounds like actually you only mean that users should be allowed to futilely attempt it, not that there should actually be allowed to run software at will. If the firmware only allows running a signed OS, and that OS only allows running approved apps, then the user is not able to install any software they want.

And as users we should be free to buy only devices that respect maximum capabilities and customization.

There is a tension between these goals, and it's difficult to resolve, so that everyone gets most of what they want. Google seems to be doing the right thing mostly though. Providing both the locked down device, and making provisions for people who want the non-standard option too.

Anyone who thinks they can do better, should enter the market and give us something better. I'd like more options for completely open and hackable phones.

Google killed every other competition via dumping and shady business practices. Sure, you can go to iOS, but that is even more closed and restrictive, not to mention the devices are overpriced.

While we're talking about that, have you heard of Bright Data SDK? A lot of apps on the Play Store include it to monetize. What does it do? It uses your phone as a botnet node while the app is open, and pays the app developer. How is Google protecting you from spyware, again?

The problem is that this is decreasingly possible. If this was possible then people wouldn't be complaining much about Android being more opinionated than an ordinary operating system has any right to be.

You paid for it but Google still has the control. I understand that you prefers things to be different (as do I) but the reality is that we don’t have control over devices we paid for.

The law. The contract. The money I paid.

> the reality is that we don’t have control over devices we paid for

So, the reality is that a company is exerting ownership rights on things they don't own. If that is exclusive, then that is called theft.

You answered the question here:

> You paid for it

If you paid for hardware, legally that makes it yours.

> Google still has the control

Therein lies the problem. Google should not exercise such control over devices which are yours, not theirs.

Perhaps this is why Google hardware doesn't have locked bootloaders; Samsung et al can get away with locked bootloaders since it's not Google forcing the consumer in that case.

Whether the bootloader is or isn't locked should be very conspicuous before purchase, for consumer protection.

So, yes, there is a lot of things stopping you from coding your own OS.