FOIA has no real penalties for noncompliance. In Washington State, our public records law has penalties (legal fees + $100 per day of noncompliance), and as a result, state agencies tend to actually follow it.
We now have explicit, written authorization from the head of WhatsApp to reverse engineer ("tear through") the binaries. The ToS only prohibits unauthorized reverse engineering. I agree with you that it was disallowed prior to this comment, but I think it's OK now.
Apparently you need to fail verification a few times before it'll present the option. I kept giving it bogus phone numbers and eventually a "skip" button appeared.
The Draeger breathalyzer fiasco in Washington State was mentioned elsewhere in this thread. Draeger has consistently resisted attempts to make its source code public. Will you commit to publicly releasing the source code to your "cannalyzer" device firmware?
> It’s no different to software providing both free and premium versions in the same binary. What are you paying for? Not the number of bytes.. the R&D hours behind it.
I think the reason people tolerate this arrangement with software is that they are not actually buying ownership of the IP that this R&D capitalizes; they're buying a license to use that IP.
Here, they're purchasing ownership of an actual car. Tesla is actively denying them full use of something that they own.
They've already failed to provide necessary post-surgery care, resulting in potentially permanent, intractable medical complications, according to this declaration filed three days ago while she was still imprisoned: https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.vaed.405498... (paragraph 13)
Because they're actually tasked (implicitly or otherwise) with protecting capital. In many cases this means enforcing the law, but in cases of corporate misbehavior, usually means ignoring it.
My experience contradicts the article's claims. I don't remember ever turning this on, and when I first learned about Location History (years ago), it was already populated with a significant amount of my location history data. Maybe I did technically agree to it in some piece of fine print or other text I didn't notice, but I contest the idea that legitimate, unambiguous user consent was obtained in all cases.