"Richard Falken"  wrote

| By the way, if you have a car, you are usually expected to know how to use
it,
| including basic maintenance.

  No. Only in your role as consumer. No one is expected
to understand car mechanics. Nor is a home owner expected
to understand home repair. The idea is that you should be
able to buy a car without it being faulty. You should be able
to buy food that's not tainted... A toaster that's not at risk
of catching on fire. Those regulations are mostly fairly
recent. Building codes and food quality standards are relatively
recent. We need the same for computing and digital data
generally. No one should have to understand HTML, script,
cookies, and so on to just load a webpage and have a reasonable
expectation that Google isn't spying on them. The Internet
was actually designed for that. Cookies were designed to be
only first party. Script was intended only to provide some
degree of interactive ability.

  As it is now, the spying and the usurping of private rights
is mostly invisible. People don't understand Google's spying.
They don't understand Microsoft has stolen their car and
parked a taxi in their driveway. They don't understand their
phone is a tracking collar infested with datamining apps.
There's no excuse for not regulating these things.

  You're never going to teach every computer and phone
user how to handle spam and phishing. Most people I know
turn on their computer, cross their fingers, do what they
need to, then turn it off. Awhile back I was trying to help
a woman who complained about an error message. "What
did the message say?" "I don't know. I just click buttons
until I find one it likes." And why not? How is anyone supposed
to make sense of messages talking about "writing to illegal
memory" or "outdated encryption" errors? The fault there is with
the software developer, not the enduser.

  We could easily pass basic laws:

* If you buy software you get full copyright rights, just
as with a book, which means you can do anything with it
except make copies. And the author can't sneak into your
house to change the software or disable it. And they can't
force you to rent the software.

* If you visit a webpage, that site has no right to sell your
data to outsiders without your permission.

* Apps have no right to ask for data access they don't need
to function. And they have no right to call home.

* Your TV has no right to spy on you, whether it's Comcast
or Samsung doing it.

  Those are all common sense and common decency. The only
reason they're not illegal is because the crime is frictionless and
invisible, and the operation of it is not widely understood. Even
the US Congress seems to have few people capable of
understanding the stakes. If you think the problem is lack of
public education then you're living in your own private Idaho.

   You can pretend that's reality in Linuxville and protest that
people should be able to compile software if they want to
use it. But in that case you'll be talking to yourself. And you
won't popularize general computing. How do
you suppose all those partially socialized geeks in Linuxville
are still alive when they don't even know how to feed themselves?
Because the FDA regulates what's allowed to go into Pepsi
and candy bars. We have basic, civilized laws that say you
can't make a candy bar out of plaster of paris or make Pepsi
with DDT and motor oil. No one needs to understand nutrition
in order to survive reasonably well despite drinking soda. They
can write code all day, play video games all night, and never
even learn how to pilot a human body. Because regulation
protects them.

  You may be able to fix your car, house and dinner. I don't
know. But I'm sure there are things in life that you depend on
without understanding how they work. And your confidence
using those things probably depends on regulation.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05