To fight apps phoning home, I agree. But even the tweet linked in OP refers to a tweet that shows how to abuse the now removed whitelisting by piggybacking your traffic through one of those whitelisted apps. On a locked down system like Android or iOS this isn't that trivial, but in a classic desktop OS use case it's easy to abuse another app to exfiltrate data.
> In essence it's about raising the number of independent failures required to result in a compromise.
Sure, it doesn't hurt, minus maybe the case that a vulnerability in that firewall itself is used.
> If you imagine the application firewall on the device has its policies managed rather than selected by the user, it starts to make more sense.
That's a requirement I guess. You don't want accountants and HR people handling popups by a firewall app. :-)
> In essence it's about raising the number of independent failures required to result in a compromise.
Sure, it doesn't hurt, minus maybe the case that a vulnerability in that firewall itself is used.
> If you imagine the application firewall on the device has its policies managed rather than selected by the user, it starts to make more sense.
That's a requirement I guess. You don't want accountants and HR people handling popups by a firewall app. :-)