If the only damage is personal (they lose their own money), why can't we make them responsible for their choices?

Because enough people losing their own money in the same way becomes a social ill.

Much in the same way we try to limit physical addiction, which hypothetically only affects the person taking the substance, and gambling (though we're moving backwards on sports betting).

Some hypothetical social ills: 1 If it's a good source of money, it becomes more ubiquitous. This leads to entire illegal markets, which will typically lead to additional crimes, up to and including human trafficking, slavery, organ harvesting, and murder https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scam_center.

2. The victims of scams will often feed shared or even stolen assets into the scam, desperately relying on an eventual return that will never come. This mirrors one of the better known social ills of gambling and addiction.

3. Even for people that never fall victim, defending against scams is tiring, irritating, and damages social fabric. An easy example is how spam cuts down on the utility of phone calls. In general, to be safe you have to be almost irrationally suspicious of anyone being surprisingly friendly, which makes non in-person connections -one of the greatest benefits of the internet - much harder and more dangerous to forge.

What do you think, is that enough reasons?

For sake of completeness, another important reason:

4. These kinds of "social ills" hypothetically affecting only individuals, actually spill over to affect their families, and, at scale, communities.

That being said, in most cases it still doesn't justify this level of drastic intervention. Otherwise, cigarettes and alcohol and even Lotto would've been banned out of existence by fiat.

So let's advance the much bigger societal ill of smartphone addiction by making people more reliant on them.

No, your reasons are laughably bad, because the societal damage caused by these scams isn't even 5% of the societal damage caused by smartphone addiction in general, and not even 1% of "general smartphone addiction" + "tiktok/instagram/infinite scroll video feed addiction" + "gacha game addiction".

> normal people can't be trusted with system-level access but some people can.

Why can "normal people" be trusted with a car then? Or firearms? Or kitchen knives?

Well, normal people generally can’t be trusted with cars: in one country of only 3.5% of the humans we kill two jumbo jets worth of people with them every day.

Tylenol is another example. Building materials is a third (building and fire codes are a relatively recent invention). Hell, even penicillin is by prescription only.

Letting the circumstance happen where median people can easily cause externalities through ignorance or carelessness is how we incinerated the planet and destroyed the biosphere as we know it with fossil fuel emissions, because it’s nbd (still even now in 2026, when we know about runaway polar greenhouse curves) to get in your ICE car and drive to the corner store.

When normal people had GP computers, we got botnets millions strong and DDoS in the Tbit/sec range and keyloggers on every hotel lobby computer hooked up to the boarding pass printer. Median people are way safer on the internet now than before.

That seems like an untenable stance. Most people don't pick healthy foods to eat or exercise as much as they should. Should we dictate what they can and cannot eat etc?

> Well, normal people generally can’t be trusted with cars: in one country of only 3.5% of the humans we kill two jumbo jets worth of people with them every day.

If you mean Indonesia (the county closest to 3.5% of the human population) or the US (the nearest above 3.5% at 4.1%+) then you are high by an order of magnitude. Two jumbo jets are around 1000 people. US car deaths are around 100 a day and Indonesia is a little lower.

If you mean Pakistan (the next country after Indonesia at 2.9%) you are high by close to two orders of magnitude. They have around 15 deaths a day.

False premise...

Elaborate?

In other areas of life, people self-select at their own risk. You can diagnose medical issues yourself, buy power tools you don't know how to use safely, and invest in assets that you don't understand.

All other things being equal, we should try to protect people. But we shouldn't force everyone to make the choices that are best for the people with the least comprehension of what they're doing.

Have you ever seen government officials talk about tech? I think you'd have to be naive to buy the narrative that they're making such a large policy decision for our security.

Of the few people using rooted phones to begin with, there's even fewer that don't know what they're doing.

Much more likely is this is a decision to get in line with the well documented and rapidly spreading surveillance laws of the past few years.

> But we shouldn't force everyone to make the choices that are best for the people with the least comprehension of what they're doing.

You are acting like it's easy to accidentally root your phone

It's not that I believe it, it's that that would be the only legitimate justification, and I'm don't suggesting even _that_ doesn't hold water.

You can’t freely sell devices to let others self-diagnose medical issues, so this part of your analogy doesn’t hold up in the case of phone sales.

We also limit investing in certain types of investments to so-called “accredited investors” which is just legal jargon for “millionaires”.

I don’t think the point you are trying to make about letting people own-goal is as strong as you think it is. (I would have gone with “roulette is legal”, which is a better one that the investment one, as the accredited investor rule is in all 50 states.)

I'm not certain what you're advocating for here?

If you are interested in the public good, I think it is pretty clear that we should ban roulette overnight since it has a negative expected value for everyone but the casino. On the other hand (still presuming you're interested in the public good), I think you have to consider very carefully whether it's good or bad to lock people out of investments or to restrict people's access to health care.

Non-ideal situation for those power users - have 2 phones. Annoying but also a perfect separation of free/personal and controlled/official spaces.

Normal people shouldn't have computers. The internet must be made back into something you sit down to use.