This type of technology sounds way too invasive. Are there no other ways of empowering people through technology without having to create such a ridiculous vulnerability and dependency on technology?
Yeah it was a great talk! Thousands of students waited for hours on the McGill campus to attend Snowden's talk -it's an important issue that a lot of people care about.
Interesting points you bring up. A point to consider is that many companies, even surprisingly many of the Fortune 500s, have very dedicated IT teams to support a web infrastructure, and so choose to make their applications using web frameworks to emulate native. I give you that it's not ideal, but when looking at the bigger picture, it just makes sense to use web rather than to force them to spend months getting ready for native support; so there might be a place for each use case.