← Back to context

Comment by bigstrat2003

4 months ago

The status quo may not be perfect but it is the best we can do. We try to educate people about scams. We give them warnings that what they are doing can be dangerous if misused. If they choose to ignore those things and proceed anyway, the only further step society could take is to take away the person's freedom to choose. And that is an unacceptable solution.

6 comments

bigstrat2003

Reply
gmueckl  4 months ago

Society takes away individual's freedom to choose all the time. You can't choose not to pay your taxes. You can't choose to board a passenger plane without passing a security check. You can't just get a loan without any guarantees to the bank etc.

Education isn't really working at this global scale. It doesn't reach people the way you seem to belive it does. Many, if not most people are generally disinterested in learning new things and this gets amplified when it involves technology.

philistine  4 months ago

> The status quo may not be perfect but it is the best we can do.

Nope. We could, for example, ask developers to register with their legal identity to release apps.

  • dmantis  4 months ago

    The original post laids out why it's not possible to do well: privacy apps, sanctioned countries, apps made by people for themselves to avoid clouds and third parties, etc.

    Simple example: I have a foss VPN app running on my phone to avoid censorship and surveillance in some countries I visit. While using this app is no problem, non-anonymous development might carry consequences to the developer in some dictatorship jurisdictions (which are plenty of). I'm not sure all devs of such system would be willing to give their ids.

    Another example is that this way US can cut out countries and people they don't like from mobile usage (which basically equals to modern social life). Look into sanctioned judges of international court because US protects war criminals.

  • pas  4 months ago

    the open source community should ask for their own install key and that's it

    Play store can be fast and verification based and the F/OSS stores can be slower, reputation and review based.

    ...

    But fundamentally the easiest thing is to ask people to pay to unlock the phone's security barriers, this makes it harder and costlier for scammers.