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Re:Google sued: Idle Android eats mobile data to send teleme... by pbhjpbhj on Saturday November 14, 2020 @06:12PM (#25096566)
How about let adults wreck the phone they bought if they 'want' to. Bootloader unlock in a 'hidden' power-on menu is sufficient. If you really want to baby users just have this set a flag that requires a click box to be ticked on next boot in order to actually unlock it (eg "you selected to unlock your bootloader in the power-on menu; unlocking your bootloader may lead to you destroying your phone, do you want to continue?" "are you sure?" "pinky promise?").

The "we're protecting people from themselves" argument seems spurious.

Re:Google sued: Idle Android eats mobile data to send teleme... by goatsi on Saturday November 14, 2020 @06:48PM (#25096744)
>The "we're protecting people from themselves" argument seems spurious.

Because it isn't the argument at all? The goal is to protect your reputation from having malware and ad laced versions of your latest hardware flooding the market (and hitting the news). Users are just a secondary concern.

Re:Google sued: Idle Android eats mobile data to send teleme... by CountSessine on Saturday November 14, 2020 @10:34PM (#25098002)
His argument is that retailers are intercepting “the phone they bought” and preloading garbage on it and repackaging it before sending it to them. Maybe that’s something that happens a lot in China? If so, requiring registering on the Xiaomi website would be a pretty good way to thwart this.

In a way, it’s to protect naive users. And it still allows you to root the phone - go through this idiocy once and then never worry about it again.