So I guess the question is, what is the alternative?
The only realistic option I can think of is some combination of:
• Make autocomplete operate on a blacklist instead of whitelist, with a more limited goal of only removing e.g. known porn sites.
• Make the list of potential matches machine-generated, without human intervention. (Aside, are we sure the current list isn't just the 250K most-visited sites on the internet, or something like that?)
Either of these would remove culpability since it's no longer a curated list. And yet, would that make it more safe in a meaningful way?
Why should Apple avoid autocompletion of porn site domains? That’s an area rampant with scam sites, especially similar domains. Plus “everyone” looks at porn so the benefits would be widespread.
If Apple wants to protect users then autocompleting porn site domains seems like the place to start, not avoid.
The absence of porn domains raises the question of Apple’s intent.
> Why should Apple avoid autocompletion of porn site domains?
Because if I’m sharing my screen on a business call, and I start typing something into my browsers’s address bar, I don’t want it to autocomplete something nsfw which just happened to share the same first letter.
There's no such thing as "machine-generated, without human intervention". Even something as seemingly simple as "most-visited websites" involves measuring choices. (Fundamentally, this is indeed about responsibility. Until a non-human gets some form of citizenship, they have none.)
Furthermore, we now know that in practice "machine-generated" seems to be even worse, because too many people are fooled by the "the machine did it" 'excuse'. (Like you seem to be doing here ?)
