zlacker

I think the downvotes might be because I specifically said outbound connections? Although if you have IoT devices it's not unreasonable that they should be able to initiate conversations with your other devices (that would then need permission to accept inbound connections from your IoT devices).

Or maybe the downvotes are because everything I was saying was conjecture / hypothetical anyway, and you're now asking a more specific question to the general question being answered.

I thought the question was "why do apps that don't need sudo request sudo?" And my answer was "perhaps because it's easier to fix permissions problems by getting permission for everything than it is to get them by understanding why your app is getting blocked by them in the first place." Whether it's inbound or outbound or taking video surreptitiously doesn't really answer the question of "why, if the app doesn't actually need it?"

At any rate, I don't actually know why because I don't ask for permissions that I don't need. I also don't know why you're getting downvotes as I didn't downvote you: this answer, like my previous one, is speculative, as is somewhat inevitable when trying to answer "why" questions that relate to the motivations of others.

>>IggleS+(OP)
For the record, I thought your original answer was excellently well constructed. The bulldozer analogy is completely recognizable to anyone who's tried to engineer any software that needed to run a local server and somehow get its data out. Geez why didn't we all think of forcing the user to run it as root? /s

Maybe more interestingly: I do think that the motivations of others are totally calculable. Society is an autocomplete. One big honkin LLM replete with all the hallucinations. Pretending to be a member of this society is to pretend that I wish to better understand why I'd be downvoted for a thought - to pretend that it's just me, a neuron, looking for back propagation. Yay for the neuron.

Nevermind, it's not important anyway. (Life).