Comment by realusername
20 days ago
This is only allowed to exist because the justice system and politicians are mostly tech illiterate.
Play Integrity is not compliant with any antitrust legislation, that's painfully obvious. The sole and only purpose of this system is to remove non-Google Android forks.
As someone working on a product that relies on Play Integrity and PAT to give legit mobile users zero captchas while challenging non-attested clients, I promise you are quite wrong here.
The benefits may not be sufficient to offset the harms you see, but if you don’t understand how and why these capabilities are used by services, I’m also suspicious you understand the harms accurately.
Using Play Integrity for captchas is completely useless, criminals are using unmodified devices farms on racks anyways. Why would they need to modify their device?
Betting on Play Integrity to solve that is betting that devices will become more expensive in the future, that's quite obvious that the opposite is happening, they are getting cheaper and cheaper.
Using your dominance in one market to secure the dominance in other market is illegal monopoly, no matter how convenient it might be for a third party.
> if you don’t understand how and why these capabilities are used by services, I’m also suspicious you understand the harms accurately
Yeah, I see this mentality a lot on HN (and kinda everywhere for that matter). "Anyone who disagrees with me is evil, and must therefore have evil motives for everything they're doing. The reasonable/innocent explanation they give for why they're doing this must actually be a front for this other shadowy, nefarious motivation that I just made up on the spot, because surely nobody ever does bad things for good reasons. Certainly not those evil people who disagree with me!"
I hate having to defend Google here, because I think this is genuinely a terrible, freedom-destroying move, but malware on Android is a real problem (especially in Brazil, Indonesia, Singapore, and Thailand, where they're rolling this out initially) and this probably will do a lot to solve it. I'm just categorically against the whole idea of taking away the freedom of mentally sound adults "for their own good" regardless of whether it works or not, and this particular case is especially maddening because I'm one of those adults whose freedom is being destroyed.
I think everyone views themselves as a harmless smol bean, even as they wage war on general purpose computing and liberty in the name of safety. How could their actions have negative externalities, they're one of the good guys!
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It's not a coincidence that this big push for Safetynet/Play Integrity happened after the pressure against Cyanogenmod and then Huawei.
If they really care about scams, they could remove all these casino-like games on the playstore. But they aren't going to do that because a huge chunk of the playstore revenue comes from those scam games.
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