Zak a day ago

This leads to a massive transfer of power from end users to corporations and governments. User-owned computers and the open web limit the ability of such institutions to place demands on users. Is that worth a slight reduction in the rate of bank fraud?

  • b_e_n_t_o_n a day ago

    Depends if you ask someone who gets defrauded of their life savings and work and is financially ruined I suppose.

    • Zak a day ago

      Most of the time, it's the bank that's on the hook for fraud, which is why they're motivated not to trust that the user's device is sufficiently secure.

      • Gigachad a day ago

        There’s no world where the bank is on the hook for fraud while also not being allowed to prevent it.

        Personally I’m ok with the bank being on the hook and their app checking there isn’t malware loaded on the OS. I have my raspberry pi and steam deck for full modding without intermingling it with extremely sensitive computing.

  • eecc 21 hours ago

    Careful, recently someone made a similar argument around gun-laws in the US, and it didn't go well for him...

    /s

Viliam1234 16 hours ago

I am not an expert, but I think this could be improved if the smartphone operating systems had better security models.

For example, an application needs "access to your disk storage", because it needs e.g. to save photos. Okay, let's give it access to its own directory. Or maybe to a subdirectory of "my pictures". But it doesn't need the access to the entire disk, right? Yet in Android, it is all or nothing.

Perhaps with better system, we wouldn't have to ban installing game mods, only to make sure that those game mods do not have unreasonable access rights. Or maybe the banking operation could state "I can only be installed when no other app has an access to my private data" or something like that.