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Comment by Ajedi32

3 months ago

> 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.

6 comments

Ajedi32

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hooverd  3 months ago

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!

  • brookst  3 months ago

    You’ve discovered local optimization / global reduction.

    But how else should Google and their users react? Insist on offering a platform with far more abuse while subjecting users to worse user experiences and websites to more attacks… in the name of abstract freedom?

realusername  3 months ago

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.

  • Ajedi32  3 months ago

    This is textbook whataboutism. The type of device-pwning malware Google is concerned with here has very little in common with "casino-like games on the playstore".

    • realusername  3 months ago

      No it isn't. Both are sources of scam and I'd argue that the scam officially hosted on the store is orders of magnitude more widespread than anything using direct installs.

      If it's really a problem they care about, here's some priorities. (And I'd personally happy if they cared as I have some family members who got scammed by those)