It is important, I think, to understand that personal computing is just one part of the picture. "Enterprise" environments (governments, businesses, large organizations, etc.) have demanded many of these "features" even before Google started implementing them. Your workplace, by and large, does not want you, the replaceable person who happens to be sitting at the keyboard, to be in full control of the device that they own and which is connected to their network. Often this is made more explicit by the device just being a "thin client" or other totally locked down narrow viewport to some other computer you can't even touch. It sucks and the general trend of workplaces trusting their employees less and less has been demeaning and degenerative to the point of often fostering self-fulfilling prophecies of mistrust (don't trust anyone => get untrustworthy people => bad things happen => don't trust anyone => ...).

However, it is important to also understand that the employee is not the only stakeholder. Government agencies answer to legislators, nonprofit management answer to donors, corporate management answer to investors, etc. There are layers of compliance that must be considered as well (internal policies, external regulations, different insurance costs, etc.). It is unsurprising that these fewer but generally deep-pocketed entities have an outsized influence on the market compared to more numerous but less moneyed end users. If you refuse to serve the former, you may quickly find yourself out of business.

The technologies themselves are mostly a good idea. The problem is that the companies designing them also like to abuse them.

Take, for example, hardware attestation on android. There's not really any serious issue with this feature, it can be used to ensure your device is not compromised. This is for example how GrapheneOS enables its use with the auditor application.

But, on the other hand, Google abuses the feature to ensure that you are running a google signed OS if you want to use Google Pay. Meanwhile you can use banking apps which also use hardware attestation (although, from their perspective, they don't use enough of it to ensure it isn't being spoofed, and even then...) without any problem on GOS. Moreover, before Google Pay completely killed all of its competition, it was possible to even find third party banks which would provide you with the ability to pay with your phone without using google pay.

Likewise, secure boot is a great concept if you want to be more sure about the integrity of your laptop throughout its lifetime. But some companies have abused it to force you to use Windows. If you want to set up your own signing keys for secure boot, you end up having to deal with poorly managed UEFI keys from third parties which weaken the security of your machine. The feature, as it's implemented, is rarely designed with helping end user's secure their machines. But the core of the design is fine.

I think limiting root on a phone is also a really good idea, the issue is that Google likes to give themselves and their "system apps" special privileges. If APIs were exposed to allow you to bless your own applications with the right permissions, you would probably not care so much about root restrictions.

So all in all, fundamentally, most of these features are fine. They're genuinely great for security. But the main problem is how they're abuse by the companies in control and how little effort is put into allowing power-users to use those features for their own benefit.

> To all the engineers working on this stuff, I hope you're happy that your work is essentially destroying the world that you and I grew up in.

I recently quit my job, developing among others the means to "protect" media using DRM. While this was not a primary motivation, I'm glad to somewhat clean my hands.

The technology (dubbed Common Encryption) is a bunch of smoke and mirrors that a childishly easy to hack around. Yet clearly aimed against good faith consumers.

> To all the engineers working on this stuff, I hope you're happy that your work is essentially destroying the world that you and I grew up in.

That was a world where the user base was much more limited and devices were less capable. Now we have children, grandparents, educated, and uneducated users with access to web connected devices. These devices now contain everything about you. Compromise of a device can destroy someone’s life.

Not only that, but compromise of a device can cause collateral damage to other devices on the same network.

We now have to cater to every user. Not just to the technologically adept. Look at what people believe on social media. The bar is so low to con people into compromising their device.

I get why they built in all of those protections; the vast majority of tech users are not knowledgeable about the details of the stuff they use. And I think a big chunk of those that are, overestimate their own abilities, knowledge, and control. They all need to be protected against themselves.

That said, I don't like that the choice is being taken away. If you do want to tinker at that level with the technology you own, you should be given the choice. By all means make it not obvious how to get there - like, have people reboot their computers while playing Twister on their keyboards with interesting key combos, but give them the option.

yes, iOS now restricts Apps from getting blanket access to their contacts, photos, and even clipboard. On the one hand, it does protect the user from malicious Apps that trick users into giving blanket access. On the other hand, they could have atleast done it like location access - where user still has an option to give blanket access. It is not fair that Siri is the only one that can access these things now.

Their incentive is really to make the Chrome Web Store a tractable problem with minimal human effort. That's about 75% of the incentive. You can't actually make any guarantees at the CWS level regarding safety of audited code if the API allows audited code to execute non-audited code.

> To all the engineers working on this stuff, I hope you're happy that your work is essentially destroying the world that you and I grew up in.

May I be blunt? I grew up in it, so yes. I am. I was there for the Windows virus wildfires. I was there for the malware distribution schemes. I was there for the first wave of enshittification. For the dotcom crash. For the spam wars. For the search engines that didn't work. For the JavaScript injection attacks. For the world where "nobody knew you were a dog" as long as you didn't talk like yourself. I couldn't trust most of my relatives to use a computer the way we had to use them in the late '90s / early aughts. That's not a problem now.

For all its flaws, the modern system is cleaner, simpler, faster, and better for end users and no longer requires them to be super-nerds (and meanwhile, open and malleable devices are still there for the super-nerds to play with and work with). This was the goal---to make computers something that benefit everyone, not just the technorati and the priest-class.

May the past become a foreign country, hard for the modern mind to comprehend. May it always be so.

You should stop seeing the Browser as a software as a program that's controlled by the user. This idea was over when Microsoft started to display ads in the file manager program (explorer).

The modern Web Browser is an advertisement terminal. If Google would manage to eliminate having to serve content, they would certainly do it.

I think it's part of a much bigger trend in tech in general but also in Google: Removing user control. When you look at the "security" things they are doing, many of them have a common philosophy underpinning them that the user (aka device owner) is a security threat and must be protected against.

IMHO that's actually part of an even bigger societal trend. "You will own nothing and be happy."

The ones in power want to control everyone and turn them into mindless sheeple to be exploited and milked. It's not just tech. There's another comment around here that mentions features being requested by large corporations and governments.

> and it's (partly) your fault

Punching down into a brutal labor environment instead of punching up into a Congress which was blatently bought off to foment this outcome? Odd choice.