Raising awareness won't stop any of this. It's inevitable. We have the technological capacity and institutional interest required to implement it, it will be done, and it will be endemic.
Raising awareness is about letting people know so that they might take the necessary precautions if they consider themselves to be at risk of its abuse, and degrades their faith in the institutions that support it.
It doesn’t matter whether they are aware. They can’t take precautions. There are no technical solutions that people can use, and technologists seem to be uninterested in working on them. Apple’s solution is the best on offer. Raising awareness about Facebook’s problems hasn’t harmed Facebook.
They can take precautions by not using iOS devices. The goal isn't to harm Apple, it's to make the knowledge available to those who need it, and have the will to avoid it.
That could mean anything from watching what they put on their iPhone, to putting them down the track of using degoogled android variants on select phones, to ditching cell phones all together depending on their needs.
Knowing that your phone is watching, reporting, and potentially moderating the content in it is information which is valuable in and of itself. Even if it only has utility to a fraction of the population.
We find ourselves in the tightening noose of a latent authoritarian technocratic surveillance society. Few people have anything to fear from it, or the resources to escape it. But some do, and should be given every piece of information that might help them moderate or escape it.
They are options that almost nobody can or will use, so they won’t have any impact.
If your goal is to inform a small minority of expert users that they should protect themselves against corporate/government encroachment, by the looks of the comments here, I’d say you’ve already succeeded.
I think you're missing my point. You do your best to inform the majority not because the majority will enact change based on it, but so that the minute and disparate slices of the population for whom that information is relevant but might not otherwise have been exposed to it can access it and perform or investigate whatever actions they deem necessary and economical to mediate the potential threat.
This forum is too niche to fulfill that purpose on its own.
The mass distribution of the information, and arguments against apple's behavior should be intended to incidentally target relevant niches beyond technically expert circles of which the communicator is unaware.
That the argument and resolution of these issues is irrelevant to most of those who will be exposed to it is immaterial.
Zepto, the Thread won't let me respond directly to yoy, but I haven't touch led any of my comments since they first received a reply. I often touch my comments within a couple minutes of posting in order to correct typos or clarify my intentions, but don't do so without remark once they've become canonical in a thread.
Your replies to my threads are as they were written.
Some of what you said wasn’t there when I replied. It could be because most of my replies were composed quite slowly from a mobile device, giving you plenty of time to make edits while I was writing. Whether this was intentional or not, it means I wasn’t replying to what you wrote.
For some reason I couldn't reply to your comment initially, so I put this in a sibling (typos and grammar excepted):
I haven't touched any of my comments since they first received a reply. I often touch my comments within a couple minutes of posting in order to correct typos or clarify my intentions, usually by appending a paragraph. But I don't do so without remark once they've become canonical in a thread.
Your replies to my comments are as they were written.
