This isn't to appease the authoritarians, it's to diminish the argument which elected authoritarians use to get their electorate to manufacture consent for thei

This isn't to appease the authoritarians, it's to diminish the argument which elected authoritarians use to get their electorate to manufacture consent for their authoritarian ideas. What Apple has done isn't a slip on the slippery slope. There's only one greased up slide in the playground and that's the presence of closed source software which auto-updates. As long as you are willing to accept closed source software which can update itself, the slope is slippery. This very public announcement by Apple doesn't change the angle of the slide, because the risk of someone sneaking in "bad" fingerprinting wasn't any less last year.