Many of us became deeply involved in tech because some person (thanks Pat Volkerding!) or organization gave us a system were we could do whatever the hell we wanted.
Well... you can phrase it like some life lesson, sure. In reality 1% of 3 million kids clicking on 'Free vbux!!' and converting is 30,000 kids having malware ridden phones, doing god knows what to god knows who.
Is increasing the profits of malware distributors by so much really worth some hand-wavy "teach kids to become a grown up" lesson?
Also, it's not just the kids. By any margin.
Well, most of those kids will run outdated Android versions with many known vulnerabilities. And they cannot update their phones, because they have locked firmware and walled-garden OS, largely put in place to make them buy new phones.
Again, the proper solution beyond a good security baseline is to educate people.
Surely you can understand why letting people do whatever the hell they want might not be the best thing when people's personal and financial data is on the line.
As a default no. But there should always be an option (with appropriate warnings) to do with your device what you want to do with it.
might not be the best thing when people's personal and financial data is on the line.
Even on a walled garden device people will open phishing mails and log in to phishing websites. There will always be attack vectors. Beyond a reasonable baseline in security (sandboxing between applications, etc.), the most important thing to do is to educate people on proper security practices.
A lot of computer knowledge comes from trying something, failing, and then learning how to recover.
I learned a lot from bricking my laptop in my early teens downloading roms and warez, and then understanding whats safe and what's not, and with little long term consequences.
You don't need to download spyware with virtually any mobile phone, pretty much everyone out there is doing already(recent ref: google maps)
I'm all for more freedoms when installing apps, but Google Maps isn't the same as this other shit.
And much of the bad behavior, such as simple apps bombarding people with ads, is standard in programs found in mobile app stores now anyway.
