I agree, the authors of cron and wget/curl should have taken steps to protect people from having their privacy invaded by others who use these tools.

I don't really understand why three separate people have decided to attack the exact same strawman of my argument. Read my response to the other person's?

Attack? I said that I agree.

In guessing this is sarcasm given these tools predate modern social networks and serve such a fundamental feature as "Save Page" within browsers already.

cron doesn't do that. As for curl/wget, both can be used to do all kinds of things other than just "Save Page". Consider combining cron and curl to upload a file to a server every hour, or to download and execute some sort of backdoor script. Whether they predate modern social networks or not is irrelevant.

I mean, I do own a rubber mallet - it's quite good for what it does!

But, no, I would buy a tool that fits my purpose. If my purpose is to hit a baseball, or hammer in a nail, I'd buy a real bat, or a real hammer, because that's the purpose of the tool.

If my goal was to swing it at a friend, though, I'd probably go for the foam bat. Just like, if my purpose was to build a piece of software to archive emails, I would build it so as that it is clearly its purpose, and it would be engineered in a way to make it challenging if not impossible to be used to secretly abscond with someone else's conversations.

You seem to be interpreting my response as "people shouldn't build tools that can be used for dangerous purposes", when instead I am saying, "you should understand, and take steps to ensure, that the tools you create are used for their intended purpose." Hopefully that purpose isn't spying on people, but if it is, be up-front about it!

> and it would be engineered in a way to make it challenging if not impossible to be used to secretly abscond with someone else's conversations.

... Thereby ensuring that it is more difficult or inconvenient for legitimate users (access prompts and notifications are cheap, not free). It's a potentially legitimate tradeoff, but it is a trade; the question is whether it's closer to enforcing sane password requirements online (probably necessary), or aliasing rm to rm -i (helpful right up until you actually need to delete 300 files at once).

No, but if I were a bat designer, I would be hesitant to sell a baseball bat full of nails under the guise of "meat tenderizer". Even though it may actual work as intended (tenderizing steaks), the way it is most likely to actually be used the majority of the time so obviously overshadows it that the product probably shouldn't be created, let alone sold.

We put age restriction labels on toys and require licenses to drive a car.

There is no licensing requirement what-so-ever to drive on private property, nor any form of registration required.

As for "age-restriction" labels, they are merely at the parents' discretion. I don't think a toy store would ask for ID and refuse a sell if age indications were not met.

I would prefer my knives have sharp points on them, despite the fact that they can be used to stab. I do not want general purpose tools "mitigated" because some people could use them to harm other people.

I want my tools to be sharp, pointy, and effective.

Blunt your own tools, but don't tell me what I can do with mine, please.