It's very obviously not irrelevant. Google is not going to let their main phone app product become associated with Grandma losing her savings! That's not going to help the free software folks... it's going to send everyone over to iOS.

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tavavex 9 hours ago | parent [-]

> Google is not going to let their main phone app product become associated with Grandma losing her savings!

How did they manage to survive as the grandma-account-draining brand for over 15 years, though? They're still the market leader.

One of the best arguing tactics the pro-control side has come up with is "The way it works right now is JUST not good enough". And then you don't need to argue any further or substantiate that. You just force your opponent into coming up with new measures because obviously right now we have an emergency that must be dealt with immediately. So far, this reasoning has worked for program install restrictions, de-anonymizing internet users, all sorts of other random attestation and verification measures, and it will be used for so much more.

My question to all that is - what has happened NOW that changed the situation from how it was just a couple years back?. Google hasn't been sitting idle for all these years, they've been adding measures to Android to detect malicious software and prevent app installs by clueless users - measures that were striking a balance between safety and freedom. Why is everything safety-related in the last few years suddenly an emergency that must be rectified by our corporate overlords immediately and in the most radical ways? How did we even survive the 2010s if people are less secure and more prone to being scammed with the new restrictions right now than they were back then?

I'm not saying there's not an issue, but without hard stats, these issues will always be magnified by companies as much as possible as the wedge to put in measures that benefit them in ways other than the good-natured safeguarding of the consumer. In an open society, there's always a point where you balance the ability to act freely with ensuring that the worst actors can't prosper in the environment. Only one of these things is bad, but you can't have both. You need a middle ground.

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scoofy 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> How did they manage to survive as the grandma-account-draining brand for over 15 years, though?

15 years ago ransomware effectively didn't exist and virtually nobody's grandparents did their banking on their phones.

	▲	Dylan16807 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Insufficient answer. "The past 15 years" is asking about that entire period. If you want to compare a specific point in time, they asked what changed since "a couple years ago". A fair point-in-time comparison might stretch "couple" as far back as 2020 because of how they talked about surviving the 10s, but no further. So, 2020 or 2023 or so. Plenty of ransomware, plenty of phone banking. What changed since then?

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lyu07282 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It's for the same reason governments all over started to implement "age verification" laws all of a sudden, they never tell us their real motivation. That we can only speculate on, but for many people it seems they just go along with it and believe them all on face value, that's what all the media does anyway. The overarching goal they all work towards seems to be total control and surveillance of people's information sources and communication.