>If we're not leasing a phone

But that, unfortunately seems to be the thinking behind most companies these days...that consumers don't own their phones, among other things, in fact most manufacturers seem to want to get onto thr bandwagon, they lease right to use them.

I'm fully in agreement with you though. Phones and most end consumer devices should not be treated as leased devices.

I may need to pay for a service to fully use said device, mobile data, wifi, etc. But those services should not be locked into one provider and should be seperate from the manufacturers.

Limits on repairs and modification should be few and a void warranty should be the steepest penalty. Modifying or repairing a device should not be grounds to have that device bricked at the whims of a manufacturer.

> Phones and most end consumer devices should not be treated as leased devices.

I lease my home. Even though I don’t own it, I still have an expectation of privacy! The law protects me from having my landlord just decide to walk in whenever they want, for example.

Privacy is something everyone should have, even on leased devices. People have things like private conversations and banking credentials on their phones.

> The law protects me from having my landlord just decide to walk in whenever they want, for example.

Depends on the state

Does it? I thought it was pretty much a given that landlords had to provide 24 hours written notice, excepting emergency.

How do you define what constitutes an emergency?

What you can prove or disprove in court.

Yes, it does. Look it up.

Some companies (like Apple) make it impossible to repair your own device even if you have tools and skills because they ask vendors to not sell spare parts to third parties. For example if a charging IC dies you have an option to either send it to Apple and pay significant mark up for the 10 minute repair or throw away the device. You should be able to buy such chip and replace it without company involvement. I hope that this practice will be illegal in the future.

What manufacturer leases a phone to an individual? I know some carriers do this.

I think part of the idea of "not owning your device" is that apple and Google have controlled gardens, apple way more than android, but still. They control the system software.

Apple also controls the hardware - for example they prevent vendors from selling some spare parts to 3rd parties. For example if a USB charging chip dies, you cannot replace it yourself, because you can't buy the part.

While I agree with this, I fear it requires legislative action. Third party doctrine effectively says you have no reasonable expectation of privacy (in the US) if data is transferred to a third party voluntarily.

That means most cloud or other "hosted" systems (which smart devices and phones have become near inexorably tied to, for the average user) offer users no expectation of privacy.

To regain this, you'd have to avoid backups to the cloud, or using any hosted service... Not easy for most users when it comes to email, or even storage. That seems to be the first logical step.

(And yes, I know end to end encryption can help, but usability is the issue for users here - end users aren't good at remembering long high entropy passphrases, or keeping bits of paper with recovery keys safe without being lost)