Day: January 9, 2019

Bloomberg has a story with the shocking headline "Samsung Phone Users Perturbed to Find They Can't Delete Facebook" (hat tip JR).
Two years ago no major news outlet would have written this. Post-Trump and Cambridge Analytica it's suddenly acceptable to express concern about Zuckerberg's enterprise.
The story, intriguing but not eye-opening to privacy buffs, provides a gauge of mainstream sentiment regarding tech giants. Eric Schmidt's company could be said to rival Facebook in the sinister department, yet its products (email, browser, etc) also can't be deleted from a Samsung phone. (Because Schmidt's company makes the operating system the phone runs on.)
About fifteen years back a programmer friend lamented the "demise of the general purpose computer." To some extent that's been happening because Apple and Microsoft make it harder to tinker with devices running their software. But it's also come to pass voluntarily, because of the mass migration to "smart" devices with undelete-able programs.