Comment by TeMPOraL
4 months ago
Websites as platform can't solve a problem that's social in nature - that it's allowed and accepted for organizations to have such excessive, invasive levels of control.
The parties I accuse of driving this problem didn't suddenly go rogue when smartphones happened. They always wanted this level of control (and much more) - they just couldn't get it until relevant technologies matured enough.
I'm not speculating here - we have actual empirical evidence to confirm this. A clear example is that there are several countries that, unlike the US and most of Europe, went all-in on Internet banking back before smartphones. Web limitations and conventions didn't stop them from doing the same thing everyone is doing with the phones now - the banks there just force customers to install malware on their computers, so they can do some remote attestation and KYC (and totally no marketing data collection) on their PCs.
Most of the West never had this because of the inverse of leapfrogging phenomenon - big, developed economies had too fast progress and at the same time too much inertia to fully adopt a pre-smartphone solution nation-wide.
My bank had website which I can log in and just use. It does not force me to install anything. I need to type username, password and SMS code, that's about it.
Every org doesn't provide that choice. If your child's activities class only communicates via an app and that is the only option in a given radius, rejecting that will mean you child doesn't get to do their activity. There are other examples that are more way more serious and make avoiding installing apps infeasible.
Because your bank isn't even trying to be secure, relative to what's considered industry standard.
Be grateful while it lasts.
Why do you think their bank "isn't even trying to be secure"?
10 replies →
> clear example
> several countries
Doesn't name a single one
...
South Korea is, the go-to example I've seen brought up on on HN many times over the years. AFAIR, they used to legally mandate ActiveX controls to access banking and government portals, and that practice continues to date even though the legal mandate was dropped. From what I read, there's still a set of applications that are commonly required to access banking and tax filing services, that purport to provide a degree of remote attestation and "security" (firewalls, detection of keyloggers and screen capture), and to access digital certificates.
Brazil is another example - ironically, the software suite that's commonly required for banking is named after the capital of the country I live in :).
Some quick searching now also flags Slovenia and Serbia as places where some banks require custom desktop (or even Windows-specific) software to access banking services.