I'm fine with an opt-in lock-down feature so people can do it for their parents/grandparents/children.
Also, just let people get used to it. People will get burned, then tell their friends and they will then know not to simply follow what a stranger guides them to do over the phone. Maybe they will actually have second thoughts about what personal data they enter on their phone and when and where and who it may be sent to.
Same as with emails telling you to buy gift cards at the gas station. Should the clerk tell people to come back tomorrow if they want to buy a gift card, just in case they are being "guided" by a Nigerian prince scammer?
> I'm fine with an opt-in lock-down feature
Me too, but it's really just some UI semantics whether this is 'opt-in' or 'opt-out'. Essentially it would be an option to set up the phone in "developer mode".
Yes, sad, but works.
People will learn about scams, but scammers are unfortunately a few steps ahead. (Lots of scammers, good techniques spread faster among them than among the general public.)
Also Chrome trusts like 300 CAs. Does that work? Probably not if you live in 200 of those countries.
I have had to actually verify my “investment profile” with a major broker in order to unfreeze some trades, in a high friction process. To the extent that a sideloaded app that looks exactly like the bank app has a low friction install, then people can get fooled and irrevocably lose savings.
If the lock-down is opt-in, almost nobody will opt in to it. If the lockdown is opt-out, then whether scams still happen depends on how much friction there is in opting out.
Freedom to install other unsigned sandboxed apps has a solution: Banks could use passkeys and other non-phishable methods. Sideloaded apps in Android can’t get to the bank app’s passkey.
Passkeys or hardware tokens get worries about the enshittification of the theoretical recovery process. Which, if that’s the case, I guess we should hope for/pay a better world, at least with banks and brokers. For them specifically, for account recovery allow either showing up in person or using ID checks.
Both for personal accounts and business accounts (i.e. with Business Email Compromise), I believe the onus should be on the bank to use non-phishable methods to show the human-readable payee from their app for irrevocable transfers.
I don't know how I feel about this change but context does in fact matter about whether something is a good idea or not
These are general purpose computing devices. It's sure taking a long time, but Cory Doctorow's talk on the war on general purpose computing is sure starting to become a depressing reality: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUEvRyemKSg
Windows S mode is a streamlined version of Windows designed for enhanced security and performance, allowing only apps from the Microsoft Store and requiring Microsoft Edge for safe browsing.I'm not the only one who has noticed: https://www.reddit.com/r/windows/s/6y39VNaLUh
Even if you are a bank or whatever, you shouldn't store global secrets on the app itself, obfuscated or not. And once you have good engineering practices to not store global secrets (user specific secrets is ok), then there is no reason why the source code couldn't be public.
Tongue-in-cheek example, just to get the point across: instead of calling it Developer Mode, call it "Scam mode (dangerous)". Require pressing a button that says "Someone might be scamming me right now." Then require the user to type (not paste) in a long sentence like "STOP! DO NOT CONTINUE IF SOMEONE IS TELLING YOU TO DO THIS! THIS IS A SCAM!"... you get the idea. Maybe ask them to type in some Linux command with special symbols to find the contents of some file with a random name. Then require a reboot for good measure and maybe require typing in another bit of text like "If a stranger told me to do this, it's a scam." Basically, make it as ridiculous and obnoxious as possible so that the message gets across loud and clear to anybody who doesn't know what they're doing.
The problem with this line of reasoning is that it proves too much, which really gets to the heart of the issue.
If people are willing to be led to the slaughterhouse in a blindfold then it's not just installing third party code which is a problem. You can't allow them to use the official bank app on an approved device to transfer money because a scammer could convince them to do it (and then string them along until the dispute window is closed). You can't allow them to read their own email or SMS or they'll give the scammer the code. If the user is willing to follow malicious instructions then the attacker doesn't need the device to be running malicious code. Those users can't be saved by the thing that purportedly exists only to save them.
Whereas if you can expect them to think for two seconds before doing something, what's wrong with letting them make their own choices about what to install?
There are just as many scam apps in play store and this system does nothing to help with those.
Locking down computing is just fundamentally wrong and leads to an unfree society.
Why destroy the ecosystem that gives you the freedom to shoot yourself in the foot?
Turning Android into another walled garden removes user choice from the equation.
https://blog.lastpass.com/posts/warning-fraudulent-app-imper...
Oh, turns out they just let you pretend to be the real company to sell your scam app.
What a load of good that "Approval" process does.
Then Google can do whatever they want with their OS and I can do what I need with mine. You might actually get phone OS competition. This is what the walled garden is actually meant to prevent.
You can’t feasibly protect someone that believes the person on the phone is their family member or the chief of police.
This kind of thing has to be verified like how they try drugs. Just randomly doing things will surely be useless, similar to how randomly optimizing parts of a program is generally worthless.
I think a big warning in red "Warning :If you don't personally know the person asking you to install this app, you are getting scammed. No legitimate business or Institution will ask you to install this app"
Done.
Pretending that this is about anything but Google's greed is giving them far too much credit.
...which clearly companies don't want, because complacent mindless idiots are easier to brainwash, control, and milk.
I'd wipe the Play Store off the face of the earth. Have you looked at the garbage on there that Google considers legit?
This: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47447600
is is the shit people are exposed to when they go through the Play Store. You don't find that on F-droid.
The second thing I'd do to combat scammers is the same thing I'd do to combat child porn and disinformation: educate people. This silly process is a technical answer to a social problem, and those rarely work well.
Furthermore, this verification system also functions as a US sanction mechanism—one that can be triggered against any entity the US decides to ban.