Re:The boiling frog of digital freedom
by yenwodyah on Sunday September 03, 2023 @09:22AM
(#37370209)
Well, it wouldn’t be the first time that a law with good intentions has prefaced a loss of freedom
Laws pretty much always mean a loss of freedom, with the intent of promoting some other positive goal (often, some other freedom). That's why we make them.
Balancing these goals is not easy, but we don't get to avoid it just because we want "freedom" as an abstraction. It's an important consideration but only one when you put a lot of people with conflicting goals together.
It's ironic that property rights have been eroded in the name of protecting property.
It isn’t ironic, it’s precisely how it’s supposed to work.
Laws take freedom (as in do whatever you want) from people and give it to other people so the total expected gains are bigger than without the law, pretending that dishonest lawmakers don’t exist (false obviously). Also, all laws are bets on their outcomes and sometimes they go south.
Activation locks were required by law to deter armed theft.
> A new report from Reuters found that iPhone theft dropped by 50 percent in London, 40 percent in San Francisco and 25 percent in New York. The drops represent theft activity as measured during the 12 months following Apple’s introduction of the remote locking feature in September 2013 as part of iOS 7.
With iOS 8, Apple made its so-called said “kill switch” active by default, in accordance with California regulation, and that should help the rates of theft continue to trend downwards.
https://techcrunch.com/2015/02/11/apples-activation-lock-lea...