You don’t own the phone. That’s how credit nonfree software works.

↑ corrected that for you.

This has nothing to do with Google.

Google welded anti-consumer logic into the kernel. Of course that’s on Google. Just like Intel started making CPUs with a management engine that can only work against non-corporate consumers, basically saying fuck the individuals’ needs… putting individuals at unconscionable risk without their knowledge or consent.

Consumers have decisions to make. Is a consumer happy to feed a supplier who sells them something that works against them? Some are. I’m not. Going forward they fail to earn my business because they have too many masters.

You going to ditch Linux because they support remote management too?

Linux is not locked down. Users can remove anything they want from it.

I must say Paypal shares customer data with over 600 corporations among other scummy things, so I boycott them. I also boycott eBay because the javascript required to use their website port sniffs your LAN and feeds that back to them, apart from other evils.

But most importantly, I’m not necessarily worried that I would personally get burnt by this. But just like my unwillingness to buy an Intel CPU with a management engine (or AMD’s flavor of this), I am unwilling to buy a product that was designed to work against me. I do not want to finance anti-consumer suppliers. ATM I don’t know how to check whether my version of AOS has this “feature”.

(BTW, I’m not the OP; I just linked their post here)

The fun aspect to this is that some banks have forced customers to use an Android for all their banking ops. So:

① You’re late paying a bill
② Creditor locks your phone
③ You cannot access your bank to make the payment because your phone is locked

Brilliant.