Replace "Apple" by any traditional car company and you should immediately become concerned. Shouldn't a car company have absolute, one-sided control over the cars they sell? Like should the car stop working if you agreed to obey the speed limit but then sped? Or stop working if you didn't use their branded fluids?
The fact that the modern world exists in an corporate-owned, proprietary cloud, versus the era of personal computers & personally-owned systems, is greatly greatly greatly confusing. I don't fully well know how to handle this great confusion. But ultimately, the trend of all rights being reserved by the megacorp is, ultimately, a vulgar anti-human anathema which we must shake off. Humanity must be allowed to pick up our microscopes & magnifying glasses, to peer in, to meddle. No legal contract preventing the natural sciences is ethical nor godly.
I have no idea how we do that. Perhaps decoupling the data-processing services from the data-holding entity might be a possible frontier. One could imagine being able to keep their identity, their core systems & datum wherever they want, & to convert Apple into a mere processor of those personal systems. That way we might not know what Apple is doing, but we at least can watch their black box act against us.
In general, trying to draw further extenuating circumstances, trying to say "except except except" is simply not ok. The phones we carry are part & parcel to their many services, in this weird conflux of computing. It reduces basic core human integrity to be denied access, to be rebuffed by EULA from understanding & witnessing & probing into these core techno-vessels we navigate about with. These mere technicalities presented, that our homes happen to be located inside Apple data-centers, is to me uninteresting & unimportant in the moral, ethical, humanistic & religious discussion and/or reckoning we have fallen into.
I mean, broadly speaking, I agree, but do you really think that "state-sponsored hacking group that provides the ability to break into people's phones to the worst regimes the world has to offer" is the use case you want to be enabling here...?
If I'm understanding correctly, this wasn't a case of "they agreed to the iCloud EULA because you have to have iCloud to use an iPhone". You don't, in fact. Yes, some services will be unavailable, and...it might occasionally bug you about it? (Not sure about the last, as I do have iCloud) No; they agreed to the iCloud EULA because they were trying to take advantage of unpatched iMessage bugs to break into other people's phones.
I fully agree that the scope of EULAs today is terribly overbroad, but I do not believe that making a legally-binding agreement not to abuse the service to harm other people or steal their data is an inappropriate use of them.
