Honest question: is that not just being complicit in their cover up? If they say nothing happened and nobody is allowed in to verify anything, then you say nothing has been verified yet so you’ll assume nothing has happened, it’s that not just doing exactly what they want? How are you supposed to prevent atrocities if all they have to do is deny and refuse outside observation for you to remain inactive?

If you’re unable to explain something as basic as reading (and you clearly didn’t bother practicing it either), I’m not sure if explanations are really the right thing for you, but I guess I’ll try anyway: Even if those were her only motives (which I’d already have to stretch pretty far to accept), that would not refute the comment you replied to, nor would it support any other inferences one might make from your opposition. Thus, I questioned what meaning you had actually intended to contribute to the conversation, since I assumed that you were trying to communicate some coherent point and not just be a waste of space and energy. If this attempt at insulting me was all you could muster in response though, I don’t have high hopes of every hearing that point, and I should probably rethink that assumption.

Yes, murder in all cases. Not like I fully analyzed my word choice at the time, but I think I did have some intent behind calling it that so I’ll see if I piece that back together: I think my overall stance was pretty well established at that point, so not risking confusion there. For “journalist-killing” vs “-murdering”, my guess is that the former just rolled off the [mental] tongue better, and I would’ve been more concerned about ambiguous attribution, for which both are basically equal, than morality, so just went with that. I believe “unaliving” supported the more casual off-tone of that question (“doing a little … on the side”) as part of my facetious approach towards the other comment, using that discongruity with the subject matter to emphasize the absurdity I was alleging in the other comment. The frog might be completely unrecognizable at this point though, so YMMV, but yeah, the intent of that word choice wasn’t to obscure the nature of that [potential] violence or avoid censorship or other automated tools, I do stand behind considering it kidnapping and murder.

What, getting your cause in the news because you got arrested for supporting it, while also showing the wrongdoers doing wrongs, doesn’t have a positive impact? Does getting in the news prevent a genocidal, journalist-killing regime from doing a little activist-unaliving on the side? Or is it that no one could possibly have motives less narcissistic and self-serving than our so-called “leaders”? What even are you saying?

Yeah, you’re right, you can open up a black box in a way you can’t really for a typical phone app/OS stackup. Maybe I argue it’s no longer a black box then, but no matter. I had originally started in on another section about better permissions and data handling and such, so I probably had a more optimistic view of permissions in general when writing, but one of the points was about being able to sniff your own (app’s) packets to be able to monitor what’s collected and sent at any given moment. That’s the sort of thing that I think makes the most sense, to directly interrogate the issue of what data they are sending back about you, rather than making logical connections from other observations.

Counterpoint: It might be normal for that device to have a WiFi radio or something to communicate wirelessly, but if the software is actually using the antenna to detect and track your heart rate, it might require an extremely (or even impossibly) talented hardware engineer to notice anything fishy from the device’s hardware itself. The WiFi and heart-rate thing specifically might not be a viable vector, dunno, but it can be a lot harder to check for stuff than just seeing if there’s an “ACME Spy Microphone” module plugged into the board somewhere. Though I agree they would probably get a worse reaction from illicitly including a hardware feature vs an app scraping the same data from your phone, even if they’d send back the same info; also that you could at least know a separate device was only tracking your car’s location, and only when you brought it with, not relying on it’s own software to decide when and where to collect data.

Ultimately, the solution might have to involve not using an OS developed by a company that also wants to slop up as much data as it can, but only so much one can do. At the very least, it’d be nice to get more separation between a “personal space” that you live your life in, e.g. socialize and consume content, and a “functional space” for other stuff that will run on your phone or you access occasionally but isn’t part of you being you, like apps for random companies or services, phone lights/sensors, a driver-insurance-safety app that should just get data pipes in from a specific list of sources and isn’t supposed to be sending data home 24/7, etc.

In some ways I agree, but on the other hand, a “box with GPS, accelerometer, mobile data, and everything else it needs to function … built right in” is just a phone, minus a touchscreen and some extra computing power. And unless you know the hardware inside the black box, just blindly passing its data through could be even worse than an app pulling stuff off your phone.