Those of us who want to can easily bypass it. My mom who doesn't know what she's doing and gets a phishing email with a fancy apk attached should probably have a hard time using it.
I'd see it the other way around and say that a device running an operating system controlled by some company shouldn't hold your entire life, bank info, photos, etc.
Without regulation markets coalesce as the winners eat each other like a game of snake. It's a miracle Apple hasn't yet eliminated Android. Although I suppose for some institutions there is only iPhone.
I was simply stating you can perform banking without a phone. You can check your email (or do your banking) on a phone... But you can do it on a desktop computer just as easily.
What you can do is create a second email that is not at all accessible on your phone, but this is not what 99.9% of people do.
No, my point was that it's pure coincidence I saw the message at all. I didnt even remember what the thread was about because it'd been so long, and your comment didnt really seem to be responding to mine.
> My point was that banks are pushing one factor, just the phone, by requiring you to use your phone number or their app as the 'second factor'. I don't know which banks you can use without a phone number in the US.
Fair enough, I dont have the experience with it. Banks in Canada certainly want 2fa, with the offered factors being phone, app, or email. Using email as the second factor works just fine and one doesn't need their app or a phone at all.
Regardless, that is only needed to do online banking - you can go in to the branch without a phone or email or app and do any banking you want.
That device was called personal computer for decades, and the world didn't end for the simplicity of installing software on it.
The "personal computer" has a terrible track record.
The Play Store's scanning is very far from perfect, and the amount of crap that's on it, combined with the trust that people have towards it, and apps' unfettered access to internet, makes malicious software easily more common than on PCs.
Even without considering as malicious the enormous data collection that almost everything on the Play Store does, encouraged by Google
It doesn't mean one can't buy nice things because one is afraid of being robbed.
Society didn't ban doing it, but put up barriers that help the average person from doing something dangerous.
I think the pumps still fit where I live, btw
Making the nozzle shapes incompatible is a smart solution, but in the US at least I'm pretty sure they're interchangeable.
To be fair, mobile phones being locked down probably contributed to the mass adoption of e.g. mobile payments and banking.
The move to apps made things more difficult, if anything
And they used an actually secure OTP dongle, eventually ditched by most banks because, yeah SMS codes and apps are safer............
It's now that a lot of people can't use any remote banking, because their bank's app is huge or refuses to run on their phone.
The EU mandates the 2FA method shows information about the purchase you're authenticating (timestamp, amount and cc used in my case), making unconnected dongles impossible to use. This makes me sad, but it does have merit.
FWIW I still use the website to do all my payments. I find banking apps to be madness - you're entrusting all your money to what is essentially a toy.
There are unconnected photoTAN devices that support this. They have a camera that reads a QR code. Some European banks use this. E.g. Vasco digipass 770
If mobile banking really wanted to be secure, they would support something like a NFC yubikey for transaction verification. The fact they fully ignore separate secure HSMs tells you what you need to know about their security.
Today people get in debt to have the latest orange iPhone, for a long time before that most people in, ok, developed countries somehow got hold of a computer.
Maybe with less brain cells burned by
[1] https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/computers...
Blocking apps is like blocking buying of knifes because one can hurt themselves.
There's not an easy answer, but the non-answer of "people just need to be educated" is trivially dismissed.
"Everyone should just be smarter/more educated" is what I used to think as well. I now fully understand some people have no desire to be educated in any way and it's a net good for society to not have a large % of devices compromised.
The logical conclusion is that fdroid should be allowed and google play banned by default.
Now my in-laws (similar age) one very demented, the other thinks he knows best because he was a chemical engineer...they could use some built in protections
so ultimately I think some default level of "guardrail" is appropriate, but it should have a not too burdensome escape hatch
Which is really exactly what google is implementing here and why I'm so perplexed so many people are upset. You or I or smart parents (my mother has never used a computer in her life and wouldn't want to) will have absolutely no issue sideloading apps after the proposed changes.
Given that google is now forced to have competing app stores due to Epic v. Google and the ninth circuit courts went into long and arduous detail in that anti-trust case about sideloading restrictions I don't think they have a leg to stand on if they get rid of sideloading completely. Oddly Apple continues to get away with it no problem.
They've been chipping away at AOSP for years, pulling more and more parts of the Android experience into their proprietary Google Play Services. In this case, they're doubling down in the same direction. Sure, it may be more or less transparent from a user-facing perspective, but it's a fundamental change to the model.
Previously, it was ultimately a local decision: Android warned you, you enabled the permission, and you installed the APK. It now becomes dependent on a Google-controlled verification/authorization mechanism. That's fundamentally different from making the existing "unknown sources" toggle more annoying.
And I generally wouldn't care "have at it" if their phone/computer being compromised only harmed them. But a bulk amount of compromised devices harms us all.
"Think of how stupid the average person is and then realize half of them are stupider than that!" -George Carlin
Family should be responsible on education or making phone of people that are not educated enough (minors, elderly, etc.) limited - I do that using Family Link. I have there my child and also my in-laws - both of them can't install new apps without my permission.
So the tech is already there, one just needs to use it.
Look at apps on fdroid, no such thing.
So the solution is simple - ban google play and allow only fdroid if one wants good apps.
You can't protect everyone. Just like there are people oblivious to bad eating habits - it is a tax on ignorance.