In school I learned the definition of politics was "the distribution of benefits and burdens". We can and probably should view this as a political question. The

In school I learned the definition of politics was "the distribution of benefits and burdens". We can and probably should view this as a political question. The benefit is the consumer right to do whatever you want with the device you bought (used by some), vs the burden of making yourself attackable by scammers etc. Google are pushing first and foremost for protecting end-users from scammers. They do benefit from this, so there is probably an incentive for them to do so. It is very practical that they can call locking down their phones "protecting users". The big question here is where on the balance scale we care about "protecting users against scammers" vs "protecting users against enshittification, closed ecosystems, and possible future power grabs". One side is very tangible and easy to understand, the other more abstract, and most consumers simply don't understand it well enough to make educated choices about it. This uncertainty is being used by powers that benefit from pushing towards the "lock-down" extreme of the scale. Peter Thiel said so himself. It is also worth noting that it is these security guys' job at Google to invent security schemes. All in all they did their job as engineers, and ignoring personal responsibility to engineer solutions that balance needs not only technical but also social, they did everything right. In a larger society there should be people who take on the job of setting boundaries for these technical solutions. Just like you need technical people to push back on technical demands from non-technical people within a company, we people who push back on this sort of stuff in our society. Us technical folks are best suited to do this job. TL;DR: The political question boils down to how many grandmas are we as a society happy with getting scammed in the name of protecting consumer freedoms? In the extreme and hyperbolic case, are we happy with an infinite number of grandmas being sacrificed? Where on the line do we want to be? And what other measures can we put into place to make the problem easier to solve without sacrificing basic freedoms? If you are technical you should probably consider taking more space in the public debate.