alt Hacker News> Police were looking for […] Google Pixel phones. These have become popular among criminals in recent years […]. Among others, the murderers of Dutch crime reporter Peter R. de Vries had Google Pixel devices with them during the attack.
This is so braindead, it’s the same as “a black person committed a crime, lets search all black people!”
If someone with an iPhone commits a crime, will they do the same?
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There is an actual Peter de Vries? Is that a coincidence? Or something Frank Herbert deliberately put in?
What it boils down to is that governments tend to prefer that the tools people have available to them are limited in capability.
iPhones and Apple systems in general are the most locked-down phones on the mainstream market, so very government-friendly in that sense.
It's why I'm always slightly disappointed to see developers using Apple systems. They're a far cry from the systems that Steve Wozniak originally built.
You can't decide to stop being black, but you can choose to not buy an iPhone. That's why race is a protected category and your smartphone is not.
And it is not "braindead". EncroChat was a "privacy service", selling phones featuring E2E encryption, disabled cameras and microphones, etc... Even though it wasn't marketed as such, it was mostly a service for criminals. And they effectively searched everyone using these devices (they hacked the firmware), and maybe a few people who weren't criminals got searched, as it happens in many investigations, most people turned out to be. The result was many arrests of people you really want to get arrested, with weapons, murder, torture, etc... being involved.
That's also the reason why mainstream apps like Signal are important for privacy, if only criminals use an app, having that app is a legitimate reason for being suspected. If most people using the app don't really need privacy and it is mostly used to talk about what to eat for dinner, that protects those who really need that privacy. And yes, it includes criminals, unfortunately, so it is actually a good thing for society when criminals use their own communication channels instead of using mainstream ones, good thing most of them are not so smart.