The problem, as I see it, is over the top access requests to access elevated privileges and personal information is the norm. This is not a user problem.
There must be a way for :
1. third-party developers to use the api to access information for their app in a kind of handshake mode - without the ability to use that information externally - or to access elevated privileges in a kind of sandbox arrangement.
2. for the api developers to use their control of market places and warnings to make these low level access privileges the norm, rather than the exception.
Getting these two things in place would mean developers would have to make a case to you, the user, if they wanted to do something more powerful or dodgy with the api.
The moral wording of their argument, the appeal to morality, comes simply from an understanding of risk management. Risk being directly proportional to both the probability and to the impact of the event. The higher the stakes the less you want to take the risk, even in a potentially low probability occurrence.
Most people wouldn't think twice about walking along a garden wall if it were only a foot above the ground. If it were on the edge of a thousand foot drop, only a daredevil would attempt it.
In this case however, we are talking about (and I apologise for the tired cliché) walking a tight-wire over a thousand foot drop. It is likely, and the consequences are most likely fatal.
In this sense, it is entirely reasonable for a person or a group, on the strength of their conviction, to use strong moral language to hopefully avert the untimely deaths of millions, and understandable to attribute immorality to those who would continue to participate in the activities which they believe would cause these deaths.
Is that language effective? Probably not.. but what else do you do to convince a population who absolutely do not want to be convinced.
And, sure there is no scientific consensus on the science. Never is.. never has been. There is, however, consensus on the risk management.
Having family in the UK (and living there for a time myself), I can assure you that whatever Thatcher meant to say - that unspoken implication was (and remains) that society is whatever the BBC says it is. The fact that the people collectively formed an opinion outside of that propaganda state just goes to show how wrong she was.
Here again, the 'majors' are feeding you propaganda, telling you what (it thinks) will be the way forward. Strangely, though, we keep seeing a common thread amongst all new music delivery models... lower prices to the consumer. I say, that is the future of music!
I just wanted to point out, two sentences in your edit actually cut directly to the heart of this issue.
Is the base starting point for society moral fairness or at least its amoral approximation of stability? The question of who benefits most (previously discussed at length in the comments) obviously.. by definition.. is more or less everyone.
Where does the wealth come from? the chicken or the egg? the farmer or the chickens? I think it fair to say with the experience of the past few years that wealth flows from the poor to the rich in boom times and from the poor to the rich in bust times.
Who benefits from stability more taking this into account?
Do I even need to answer this question?
I like that.. questions, answers and everything else.
Though I think questions aren't there to give you answers, they only throw up more questions.. but I reckon they give you directions. When those questionable directions start to converge you know you are onto something you don't know.
When those questions converge like an asymptote..ad infinitum, that's what we call answers.
Doubt scares people, they just want to know where the line ends. But in the real world the only way find such an direction is trial and error.. i think.
Theoretically, they can also be statements that are testable in the future.
Ex: At 25C and 1atm, oxygen is a gas, not a liquid or solid. No matter how many times you test that, it will always be true; hence, it is a fact.
Of course, if you ask enough questions (How do you know it is 25C? Why are you confident that instrument is accurate? How do you establish the temperature scale in question?) the person claiming it is a fact will eventually get confused (it is was something they didn't realize they didn't know), send you off to ask someone else (if it was something they know they didn't know), or bored (if it was something they know but they are tired of answering your questions) and you will be free to think the fact wasn't really a fact after all.
