strength in numbers

no need to say more. thank you good sir!

I'm genuinely curious ? what "someone" had his life destroyed ????

ah I see. Because here (Canada), the last couple of years, both SMS and MMS are free (for any destination at all, as long as it is sent from withing Canada)

, is that from experience? (never used it, SMS is free and universal more importantly does the job for me )

or textSecure?

1st year is free : http://www.whatsapp.com/faq/ge...
99 cents/y may be cheap, but certainly not free

^^^what he said. On some nexus devices (recent ones) you can unlock later without wiping (BootUnlocker app for example, it's available in the play store and opensource ). You might consider building everything your self and SIGN your builds with your own keys (something other than the test key, as the private keys for those are available to anyone) and make sure any recovery you'd use enforces "signature verification" (and that it can not be disabled)

newer motorola devices are unlock-able with fastboot! All you need is a key, that you can get freely on motorola website, the trick is that you need to agree to somethingS ( among then : warranty is void)

the only shady part is unlocking (the only way to unlock some devices is through an exploit --a security flaw--) the bootloader! the rest can be done with the platform-tools you can get with the android SDK!

that's not from google, root is enabled by default Engenering and debug builds (from AOSP) the minute you lunch $device-user bye bye root.
and it comes in one and only one form : adb root (the ability to have root access from adb)

I'm not certain, but I think there is, CTS you need that and comply with ACD (Android Compatibility Definition) to be even considered for a license to ship the Google apps.

can't they -the user- hire "a true überwizard " to do it?

no "command line", honestly that;s the only thing stopping me from getting one. Now I have a Mazda 5, not as big -6 adults but no cargo space, or crap load of cargo space no passengers, and yeah manual transmission :-).

Well, that's for their attorney and a judge to determine, not for me, you or "people".

Some might argue that Sony is liable for negligence -- not properly handling/storing sensitive private data --.