I agree, but what I disagree with is the idea that everyone must be prevented from freely installing software on their own devices to make sure unskilled people cannot be tricked into doing it.

I don't really understand why a well designed sandbox and permissions system doesn't solve the problem.

Well cars kill people, granny using the password “password” does not. We can’t prevent all levels of stupidity and carelessness.

If people want to have dumb passwords and download malware, then so be it. You think they can’t do that today with the google play store? Of course they can. Most malware on android comes from the Google play store.

Maybe a drivers license should be needed to have a phone.

Do you hate open source and want only projects where their authors can afford liability insurance and are willing to put themselves in the firing line of a legal system that can be both arbitrary and capricious? Because that’s what you seem to want.

>People that accidentality cut their fingers in lawnmowers due to lack of safety features are allowed to sue the lawnmower company.

Anyone is allowed to sue the lawnmower company. Did they win?

On power tools, appliances, etc. the safety features are at the user's latitude to bypass. They are usually a hint (don't microwave your dog), not a hard barrier ("I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that"). A spinning blade is covered by a grill you can trivially remove without permission from anyone.

I agree that the defaults should be secure, but you can't force security on people without creating parallel issues which are maybe worse. Centralizing this power in a single point can have orders of magnitude bigger blast radius than a security failure on an app.

At some point users have to take responsibility and be accountable for their actions. We can't just infantilize them forever as if a magical hand will always be over them protecting and having their best interest in mind. And we certainly shouldn't punish every user for the sake of some of them.

The worst part is that Google gets the benefit of putting itself as the central point of control over the ecosystem based on a promise to keep users safe, but without any of the liability from failing to keep that promise. When the app store is chock full of malware I'm really starting to suspect that their goal is actually only the control. And all those people defending it with "but people don't know better, they need a hand to guide them" were equally misled. What do you think?

Yes and no.

The computer itself won't really do anything. But I'm sure suicides go up when people lose all their money, or get personal private details leaked, and so on.

ehm: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25

Depends on what those computers are responsible for.

I'm sure you can think of many examples where it does though.

Nope.

A problem that can't be solved, you can't check every single program out there much like you can't check every single human ever even with cameras installed everywhere.