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JuniperMesos 9 hours ago

> (She contacted the bank and the police, and they managed to reverse the transactions and get her her money back. But she was a mess for a few days.)

And this almost certainly means that the bank took a fraud-related monetary loss, because the regulatory framework that governs banks makes it difficult for them to refuse to return their customer's money on the grounds that it was actually your piano teacher's fault for being stupid with her bank app on her smartphone (also, even if it were legal to do so, doing this regularly would create a lot of bad press for the bank). And they're unlikely to recover the losses from the actual scammers.

Fraud losses are something that banks track internally and attempt to minimize when possible and when it doesn't trade-off against other goals they have, such as maintaining regulatory compliance or costing more money than the fraud does. This means that banks - really, any regulated financial institution at all that has a smartphone app - have a financial incentive to encourage Apple and Google to build functionality into their mass-market smartphone OSs that locks them down and makes it harder for attackers to scam ordinary, unsophisticated customers in this way. They have zero incentive to lobby to make smartphone platforms more open. And there's a lot more technically-unsophisticated users like your piano teacher than there are free-software-enthusiasts who care about their smartphone OS provider not locking down the OS.

I think this is a bad thing, but then I'm personally a free-software-enthusiast, not a technically-unsophisticated smartphone user.

josephg 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> And this almost certainly means that the bank took a fraud-related monetary loss, because the regulatory framework that governs banks makes it difficult for them to refuse to return their customer's money on the grounds that it was actually your piano teacher's fault for being stupid with her bank app on her smartphone

In which country? This happened in Australia. The rules are almost certainly different from the US.

SchemaLoad 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

For me the answer is separate devices. I have an iphone which is locked down and secure. I have my banking and ID apps on it but I can't mod it however I want. Then I have a steam deck and raspberry pi I have entertainment and whatever I want on. I can customise anything. And if it gets hacked, nothing of importance is exposed.

5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]
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