> You may agree with its decision this time, but will you always agree?
To be honest I'm kinda sick of this argument. Someone brings this argument up _every single time_ a tech company takes action against something malicious. It's a strawman argument at best and at worst a way to give people an out on acting against something that could harm the user.
> Apple's wielding of power in this way is likely to attract the attention of groups such as copyright/IP lobbyists, which have an immense desire to have all "non-authorised" files/software erased from all user's machines.
How is it a strawman? It's not even a hypothetical, has everyone forgotten already the constant dramas from the era in which Steve Jobs insisted iPhone apps would be banned if they weren't of "very good quality" or whatever the BS wording was? And when he went on his personal moral quest against porn?
This seems like overreach to me. It's annoying but it's not like the Zoom app was silently letting people watch me for hours through my webcam without anyone noticing - the app opens a full screen video sharing GUI for goodness sake. Is being joined to a VC without me wanting it when I click a link annoying? Sure. It also serves the attacker no real purpose and thus has never actually happened in the wild. It's also easily fixed. This is a storm in a teacup.
Moreover it seems from the last discussion of this on HN that videocall firms do this for a good reason - lots of users get confused by bad Safari permissions GUIs and end up locking themselves out of the app by cancelling the URL open prompt without thinking (which is apparently persistent!) Then they can't join the call. So the only reason these firms are using such a bad workaround to begin with is because Apple screwed up their user interfaces: why is this not on Apple to fix?
This appears to send a message to Mac devs that a single troublemaking blogger can cause Apple to kneejerkingly nuke features in your app overnight, regardless of whether you are fixing them, whether they're serious or not or whether it will result in legions of confused and stuck Mac users. Not a great message.
> Someone brings this argument up _every single time_ a tech company takes action against something malicious.
The argument isn't about taking action against something malicious, the argument is about the implications of being able to take that action and what sort of power the company has and if they should have it in light of past abuses (not necessarily but that company, but this is totally irrelevant since companies are made up of people that come and go, they do not have a single "brain" or morality).
> > This will never happen
> You cannot guarantee that.
Can you guarantee that it will happen within the next, say, 5, 10, 15, or 20 years? Somewhere within there, the devices we're currently using will likely be replaced, and the landscape will have changed.
What I personally care about, privacy-wise, is the present and near future- will my family be safe on the internet with what I've set up for the next five years? Probably. Will the computer I'm using to type this reply on be replaced within a decade? Probably so. Will my family get a new PC within the next ten years? Yes.
Can you 100% guarantee that the Government of the United States will be intact in twenty years? No, the threats from Russia and China (both nuclear countries) and North Korea (armed or not, they're still dangerous), and space asteroids and epidemics and terrorists and politics and civil wars are not zero.
Can you 100% guarantee that California won't sink into the ocean in 100 years? That would make for some really bad real estate investments, yet people still buy and sell and build there.
People are still living in California, trading with each other, the US Government is still stable, and Apple is currently upholding and protecting user privacy. Also, we still have electricity and the internet. Now is a great time to be alive.
To be honest I'm kinda sick of this argument. Someone brings this argument up _every single time_ a tech company takes action against something malicious. It's a strawman argument at best and at worst a way to give people an out on acting against something that could harm the user.
> Apple's wielding of power in this way is likely to attract the attention of groups such as copyright/IP lobbyists, which have an immense desire to have all "non-authorised" files/software erased from all user's machines.
This will never happen.