@ploum @mysk In other words: if you don’t have time or money to acquire or hire the expertise to set up a surveillance-free phone, with a full suite of self-hosted E2E encrypted cloud services, so your only options are Google’s (“Alphabet’s”) panopticon or Apple’s panopticon, then you choose to be surveilled.

By that same pattern of reasoning, when a friend of mine was a middle school girl, and someone spiked her drink, and the local underinvestment in public transit left her only the options of getting a ride from one of two leering and crude men who took “no” as a challenge, she “chose” to accept the marginally less creepy man’s touching. Bullshit!

Nothing is a choice unless you have a real option to refuse without collateral consequences, and nothing is consensual unless you have a real choice. The EULA saying “this is going to happen; accept it” doesn’t change that any more than the “female body inspector” t-shirt gives its wearer consent because the passenger was more scared with of the guy hiding improvised constraints in his cargo pockets.

Apple’s argument is invalid unless and until a single parent RN (for example) has the necessarily turn-key option of a full-featured phone with all the accompanying services and none of the surveillance.

There’s no such thing as consent absent the right to refuse. And rights, by definition, are inalienable. They are not removable through an imposed “choice” of either an abusive EULA or an even worse one, like a guerrilla offering a “choice” of which limb to lose.