What is the threshold for how informed someone must be in order to be allowed to give consent or make their own decisions here? What responsibility would you place on Apple here versus on the consumers of its devices, specifically?

More than likely if you ask for more than what exists what will actually happen is that another blurb will show up in the long terms of service that most people don't read and people aren't any more enlightened about what exactly their device does.

Don't operate something you've sold to someone remotely for your own benefit with explicit opt in that is difficult to do without understanding. Full stop. Don't mine their device for data. Don't harvest anything at all from it without an explicit interaction or intentional manually configured automation.

So far, far, far away from where google/apple/ms have drawn it.

This feels like a really loose interpretation of operating something remotely. If they have a backdoor to your phone that lets them flip a switch, that's one thing... I think in this case it's turned on through a software update, which is in the control of the people using the device. That's another feature that is opt-out, by the way. Why? Because requiring input from users to update their phones results in most people not updating their phone, which is a security risk.

It's not so cut and dry and being that dogmatic about it in one direction when there's clear and significant downsides to doing that way is shortsighted. Even if you prompt the user asking for permission for every single thing going on on their device, what do you think the outcome of that will be? Most people I know have tons of notifications from every app they install on their phone because they don't even look at the popup after the first couple times it appears.

It would be nice if Apple recorded some visible metric on how much this is “costing” the user.

Eg how much energy or how much bandwidth.

Then we could make an informed decision.

For me personally the usage of my resources was apparently so low as to go unnoticed.

I had to be told by the Internet that it was even happening to an extent that could be noticed.

It would be interesting to have stats though.