In a largely cashless society like the UK, ‘banking apps’ are effectively people’s wallets. Knowing you got paid, being able to pay your rent, being able to pay for goods and services… seem like pretty everyday concerns.

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b112 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

If you're bored, have Claude pull apart your APK and do a privacy report.

Your banking app is almost certainly using a company like (horrible and evil) Yodlee, which is given data by your banking app under the guise of "organizing your transactions into categories". Yodlee then quickly de-anonymizes it, by the identifiers which are identical and given to firebase, and various other orgs. Yodlee has been caught doing this before, and they still operate.

Lots of other companies do this, so if your banking app has any callbacks to anywhere but the bank itself, it's nothing but trouble.

After deanoymoization, such data is of course sold to everyone, including intelligence agencies, domestic and foreign.

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jameshart 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

What does this have to do with the claim at hand which is ‘we need to keep our comms infrastructure secure because critical things like the primary way our population conducts economic transactions depend upon it’?

That you find the population’s choice to use such mechanisms questionable, or that you think it is foolhardy to do so, does nothing to disobligate the government from trying to keep that infrastructure up and running.

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b112 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The point more is, this is one primary mechanism to spy on the populous. Primarily via 5-eyes, which means Americans are buying this data to spy on UK citizens.

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staplers 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I think they are pointing out it's an oxymoron. There's nothing to secure if the service itself is insecure and leaking..

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TallGuyShort 3 hours ago | parent [-]

It's classic what-aboutism though. Availability is part of security and that's what seems to be considered here. It's also the more immediate concern. Yes, the software supply chain and where your data goes has high potential for compromise. But I'm not actually seeing rampant fraud in my accounts or data leaks from my bank very often.

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b112 3 hours ago | parent [-]

High potential for compromise? No, the point is that every single transaction you make is being sold on the open market, that's the problem. Using cash prevents this. Using debit cards, credit cards, banking apps ensures this.

The banks provide the data anonymized, but then provide means to de-anonymize it.

	▲	TallGuyShort 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		You are discussing concerns that are completely orthogonal to the thread. The availability of digital banking was the concern. Not end to end privacy.

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TallGuyShort 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

So yeah that sucks, but... what does that have to do with the concerns being discussed here?

Digital banking in some form is pretty unavoidable for me unless I want a "live in the woods" type lifestyle and all the consequences of it. And I don't even live in the UK where they've embraced it more. My mortgage was sold to a very distant company and we've had mail problems. My dog recently needed middle of the night surgery and they wouldn't start without payment that exceeded normal cash reserves + daily.

Yes, all these things suck, but shooting digital banking in the knee without a solution to all that isn't helpful.

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autoexec 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Digital banking might be unavoidable but what did your app do that you couldn't have possibly done via your banks website?

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TallGuyShort 3 hours ago | parent [-]

You know, I didn't rush my laptop to the vet with me. If you're going to argue with the "mobile phones and banking app" line to this extent, I will freely admit: yes, if you want to be a Luddite, satellites are indeed unnecessary. You are absolutely right. But still not convincing me that's a weird thing for them call out here.

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3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

[deleted]

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b112 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Realistically, paying your mortgage isn't giving any data a credit pull wouldn't. It's not a secret you live where you do. And one off emergencies aren't the problem.

It's foregoing cash for every single thing you do. That, combined with the telco selling data, Google linking that data to the number, and apps such as your banking app working in this same ecosystem, and companies such as Yodlee, your profile has a minute by minute location, plus what you spend and where.

It lets intelligence agencies, buying this data, create links between people. Who you know. Who you talk to. Where you go. What your hobbies are.

This gives the power of manipulation, for knowing who you are in the real world, combined with what you do online, means they know you better than you know yourself. And that's quite important, if you want to manipulate opinion.

All this may not matter to you, and if so, that's fine.

But this data is, quite frankly, what gives the Americans the power they have. The Americans aren't mighty due to guns, and weapons, and an army. They are mighty because of information.

Information is how you send a mere 40 dudes to kidnap the President and his wife from Venezuela. Information is how drone strikes perform targetted attacks. Information is how you manipulate elections in foreign countries. It's the sort of power that means you don't even have to fire a shot, to overthrow a government.

This information is what modern banking, and its apps, and companies such as Yodlee give to the Americans.

And as a Canadian, with the Americans blathering on about 51st state this and that, I am perhaps over sensitive to this fact. Because the last thing we need, is to give Americans power over us.

Any power.

Even the tiniest bit.

And information? Is more powerful than anything else they have.

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TallGuyShort 3 hours ago | parent [-]

You are discussing concerns that are completely orthogonal to the thread. The availability of digital banking was the concern. Not end to end privacy.

	▲	b112 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It's OK. You can talk about things tangential to the main thread. It happens all the time on HN. And I'm not blaming you for anything. My frustration is likely just showing, on this specific topic.

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bigyabai 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

That's going to be a problem when the UK faces sustained service disruption attacks. Building fragile systems like this during peacetime is usually an ill-informed bet.

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pmg101 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Surely one of the great dividends of being at peace is not having to live like you're at war?

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JumpCrisscross 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

We’re not at nor heading towards peace. Pax Americana is failing. There isn’t a hippies-and-unicorns exist from that structure, not in a disorderly way.

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someonebaggy 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I didn't realise only people at war used cash

	▲	jameshart 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		[dead]

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bigyabai 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Rather the opposite. Peacetime is the only good opportunity to promote robustness and refuse toleration of vulnerable systems.

If you allow your banks and courts to be hacked freely by an adversary, then you can be manipulated into losing control of the escalation ladder.

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autoexec 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

At the very least the idea of a population fearing for their future if an app doesn't work is frankly horrifying. In the case of banking apps there are already multiple, simple, well established, and widely supported alternatives to using the app available to them, but that should really be the case for anything actually critical an app provides.

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sieabahlpark 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[dead]

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autoexec 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

All of that can be handed via your bank's website, ATMs, a credit card, or even (god forbid) writing a cheque.

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jameshart 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

All of which (except the cheque, which we can ignore - nobody in the UK has a chequebook any more) depend on the same communication infrastructure that the app does.

	▲	autoexec 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> All of which...depend on the same communication infrastructure that the app does. That being the internet, which in the vast majority of cases doesn't depend on satellites either. Wifi, fiber, coax, and copper would continue to work just fine.

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dukeyukey 40 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I imagine that if all banking apps go down as a result of war then bank websites, credit cards, basically any other digital financial thing will also be down.

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pixeljam 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

A lot of banks in the UK have mobile-app-exclusive features / services. I imagine this is because of security, but it also makes little sense. If you don't have a smartphone it is about 5x harder to do anything online-banking related here. I remember when I went camping a bit ago my phone died and I was unable to unfreeze my card.

Also, cool username =)

	▲	autoexec 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> I remember when I went camping a bit ago my phone died and I was unable to unfreeze my card. Not even over the phone? I'd be furious. Cell phones die, get lost, get stolen, get run over, etc. I'd personally hate to feel so entirely dependent on my phone being there 100% of the time. I don't even always carry mine with me.

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3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[deleted]

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carlosjobim 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Do people write cheques in the UK?

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mcintyre1994 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I’m in my early 30s and I don’t think I’ve ever written one. When I had my first bank account when I was maybe 10 I was given a cheque book, I don’t know where I’d get one now. I did recently receive a cheque for $12.99 or something like that from an Amazon settlement that I think is probably legitimate. Apparently Monzo can cash a cheque through their app so I’ll try that at some point. I’m guessing it won’t work with an international one though.

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autoexec 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> when I was maybe 10 I was given a cheque book, I don’t know where I’d get one now.

I'm guessing you'd walk into your bank and ask for one. You can probably order one from their app somewhere.

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rebolek 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I’m older (not in UK, in EU) and cheques are something weird from old movies. Never seen one in real life and concept is really strange.

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dylan604 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

A couple of years ago during lockdown, I was working with someone definitely qualifying as a boomer, to start up an e-commerce site for him. He was proudly showing me his ledger book of checks that he had to shell out $200 to receive while declining a debit card. On a couple of occasions, I went with him to get cash by driving to a bank branch, writing a check, and having the teller cash it for him. It took months to convince him that he absolutely needed a debit card when people were constantly asking if they could use Venmo/CashApp/etc to pay for products.

So we're still in a transitional stage where some people are still stuck on using checks.

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autoexec 3 hours ago | parent [-]

At least I see them being used less often in stores. Also how on earth was he paying $200 for checks? You can get them for < $15. Here's a book with a fish on it, and a ledger, and a cover for under $25 https://www.checks.com/p/856/wonders-of-the-sea-checks

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dylan604 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Man, don't get me started. However, business accounts are more expensive than regular accounts. Also, why are you surprised that a bank has found a way to charge more fees?

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esseph 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Check processing I think, not writing them

	▲	dylan604 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		No, the ~$200 fee was for the book ledger and blank checks. I have no idea what kind of monthly fees the bank was charging for the account. He was also getting raked over the coals on his merchant account to process credit cards because it was deemed a high risk business so most reputable places would not accept the business.

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autoexec 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

There are several companies in the UK offering cheque cashing services so I presume somebody there is getting them.

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baliex 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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TedDoesntTalk 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Or checks?

	▲	jameshart 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Certainly not spelt (or spelled) like that.