The reality is there are two operating systems for mobile devices for >99% of the population.
The reality is many applications developed for those devices try to harvest data from the user, often without their consent. Contact details, location data, correlation to other apps installed, and so on, in order to make money.
The reality is that this is unethical without explicit consent, and nothing will stop these actors except technical barriers to this malicious activity.
Your desire to sleep in your apartment with the windows open and doors unlocked and cameras off is yours, but if there is a binary decision of "have these protections or not", the answer is clear.
Personally I am not advocating for "protection", protection against what? Your own device? Why is your device harming you to begin with?
The online data privacy crisis isn't really about data or the bad actors, but the lack of understandability and control over our own electronics.
To solve the problem you need to make users more involved, remove automation in favor of manual processes but simplified as much as possible. "Protections" are mostly band-aid hiding the real cause.
Seatbelts don't need to be worn by good drivers, because they won't get into accidents!
>protection against ... your own device? Why is your device harming you to begin with?
Yes. Because some apps do more than they claim to do, and users are unaware, and thinking that all citizens can be perfectly informed and thus do not need to put guardrails on app permissions is foolish.
>but the lack of understandability and control over our own electronics.
The lack of control over the data that can be extracted by bad actors that seem like good actors.
>"Protections" are mostly band-aid hiding the real cause.
The real cause is that humans can be malicious, others can be fooled, and the first goes after the second.
> Seatbelts don't need to be worn by good drivers, because they won't get into accidents!
All humans are fallible, but it may be out of your control. There is no other human between you and your device.
> Yes. Because some apps do more than they claim to do, and users are unaware, and thinking that all citizens can be perfectly informed and thus do not need to put guardrails on app permissions is foolish.
Why do you even have to trust what apps say? That's my problem with this reasoning, we are under the assumption that programs control your device and that nothing can be done about it except adding warnings. Why do programs need instructions to access data? How about forcing the user to plug any environment access into the app? Anything that isn't plugged cannot be accessed, no trust required.
> The lack of control over the data that can be extracted by bad actors that seem like good actors.
The solution is to give control over the data, not with protection, but understanding. You are transforming this tech problem into a human problem.
> The real cause is that humans can be malicious, others can be fooled, and the first goes after the second.
Again no human between you and your device/program. We however decided that software can be malicious.
The reality is many applications developed for those devices try to harvest data from the user, often without their consent. Contact details, location data, correlation to other apps installed, and so on, in order to make money.
The reality is that this is unethical without explicit consent, and nothing will stop these actors except technical barriers to this malicious activity.
Your desire to sleep in your apartment with the windows open and doors unlocked and cameras off is yours, but if there is a binary decision of "have these protections or not", the answer is clear.