Visitors to Qatar for the World Cup need to install spyware on their phone | Hacker News Reader

Visitors to Qatar for the World Cup need to install spyware on their phone

schneier.com

82 pointsmikece48 comments

Apparently the one app requires permissions for "an overview of your exact location, the ability to make direct calls via your phone and the ability to disable your screen lock."

I've never heard of any app being able to make calls or disable the lock screen. Is that even possible? I suspect maybe on Android?

I believe the "disable lock screen" permission is to prevent auto-lock, for example while displaying a video or QR code, and does not mean anything like that the app can remotely unlock the phone. The other permissions are certainly concerning.

Disable Lock Screen means disabling the auto shutoff of the screen. This is important for any app that needs to remain constantly visible.

But is it actually needed or is it a way they can make sure the phone doesn’t lock if they confiscate it?

The permission does not give the ability for an app to make a user unable to lock their screen. It enables an app to disable the automatic lock.

If I really needed another reason not to visit a totalitarian, human rights-violations, murderous, anti-gay dictatorship to watch someone play football, this might move the needle.

But really, I’m way past that already and I would hope that most other civilized people are as well.

The media world and big business in general isn't civilized people. It is composed of, but the business itself couldn't give a rat's arse about not going to humanitarian shit hole if said places had a ton of money to spend and cared about generating a ton of positive PR.

I don't watch football but I follow Formula 1 and we have the exact same issues. There's plans in closing historic F1 races while we're now expanding in totalitarian regimes, like Saudi Arabia, where last year a missile fell miles from the circuit during free practice.

These totalitarian, humanitarian shit holes have a ton of money, and money wins over any moral qualms.

And no, I will not refrain from calling these like places like that. Of course, I refer to their governments and religious institutions, not the average person that are powerless to institute some change.

Well how can you say much about a place without visiting? These descriptions can be used for so called “civilized” places. Especially Western countries not even standing by these “civilized” values shows a lot where their hearts are. They’d rather kill millions, exploit economic conditions, and pontificate about ideals they don’t even act in accordance with.

It’s propaganda you’ve been fed to assume the rhetoric of civilized vs uncivilized. Really every place has barbarism, some hidden behind arrogance, it seems.

There is a very large gap in degree of barbarism between Qatar and Sweden, for example. It's a false equivalence to say that because barbaric attitudes exist everywhere that they are equivalent.

Also, in 2022 with so much information available about most things I shouldn't be required to travel to every single country to have an actual informed opinion about the place. I definitely don't need to visit Russia to have a basic grasp on its society. I can just read some books, essays, articles and have at least a basic understanding of it, which will then inform me to visit it or not.

Or do I need to visit North Korea to be able to say it's a fucked up place and recommend someone to not consider visiting it?

Perhaps an open mind can observe and receive with grace, to see a more whole picture.

Every place has something to teach us, something we can learn. There’s a lot of prejudice and distortion to work beyond, so curiosity does us well.

There are some things you must experience to understand. I think to write off a place completely for largely inflated reasons is missing this.

Even if you disagree with the administration of a place, you can meet a lot of people who may change your life for the better.

don’t let ignorance cut you off from growth

Of course that every place can have beautiful people and encounters but spraying this toxic positivity around places which are morally questionable doesn't really help much.

I can go to beautiful places, with friendly people and lots of amazing nature and food. Some of these places I can also be murdered. Or the government of some of these places can take me away for no reason other than ransom due to some geopolitical issue that I have nothing to do with.

It's not ignorance to be informed about the general feeling of a society and then be able to judge myself if visiting said place, transferring my money to those regimes, is something that I can morally support.

Visiting Qatar, Saudi Arabia and so on is not something my morality can support. I'm not judging the civility or not of those societies but I can choose to support those regimes with my money.

Amazing people exist everywhere, I'm free to choose to not go to places that I know don't align with my morals.

And please, don't patronise me about growth by traveling, I have traveled well enough to know what beautiful encounters can happen. I've also traveled enough to not carry a toxic positivity that everywhere is amazing and should be visited, no, there are places where I won't ever visit again.

You also forget that there are experiences that can change you forever for the worse, like a friend of mine who had her husband murdered in Mexico. Or my friends back in Brazil (where I'm originally from) who also have horrible experiences with meeting people when traveling in the country.

It's an absurd naivete to assume that visiting places can always provide you with beautiful and engradising experiences.

Anyways, you speak with some harshness, I hope you can not hurt with it.

Safety is very important of course, but I don’t think for Qatar, Saudi Arabia, that is an issue for international travelers. I wonder how the morality of the place you live in is and if it aligns with you, because often we cannot control it.

I’m not sure about your morality, but to speak of knowing it doesn’t align with you, I wonder if you really know.

Anyways I can say from personal experience, the places are very safe, and amazing experiences I hope to revisit. Every place has problems, and we can all make choices. Just like Brazilian author Paulo Coelho’s protagonist in the Alchemist, we can choose to continue on in our journey or never embark in the first place.

Every place has barbarism. But the kind and degree matter. There isn’t an equivalence between what, say, China or Qatar are like and the (terrible) practices of, say, the US. And even if there were, tu quoque doesn’t add anything to the discussion.

It does matter when people believe and think (out of nationalism, ethnocentrism) that they’re in the paragon of virtue and civilization while everyone else is some backwards people entrapped in darkness…

Anyways you can be critical of a place without being arrogant of your own position. Most people writing here about Qatar act as if their own countrymen are amazing when they probably haven’t even visited the middle East!

Pure pontification, and no open-mindedness to seeing a holistic view. It dilutes the valid criticisms when people speak out of ignorance.

Even if “most people” were doing what you claim (they don’t), no it absolutely would not matter. Comments like yours are simply attempts to deflect or mitigate criticism with spurious argumentation.

Do not forget most of the labor for those Stadiums is bonded-labor/slave labor from Indian sub-continent.

Is anyone planning on watching the World Cup this year? Do you think this is worse than normal, in terms of the host country's track record?

I always try to catch as much as I can, I really enjoy it, but this year in particular it seems nauseating.

Personally I don't plan to watch it. Even though I've always followed the World Cup (and the Eurocup sometimes).

I was born in Brazil and over there the World Cup is an event with massive following, to the point where schools and companies allow for off-days or at least dismiss people to watch the national team matches.

I simply can't watch this time, morally it has always grated how fucked up FIFA is but I think this was the tipping point for me.

Unfortunately I don't see this point of view being shared by most around me, not in Brazil and not here in Sweden. It puzzles me a lot.

I'm planning to sit this one out. Qatar uses forced labor and more than 6500 migrant workers were killed preparing for this World Cup. There's just no joy in watching it whatsoever, only shame.

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2021/feb/23/r...

Qatar is abusive and I'm having a hard time finding anything good to say about it, but nevertheless that particular fact seems like it might be being taken way out of context.

Qatar has 2 million migrant workers. The 6500 is taken over several 10 years, according to the Guardian article that nathanaldensr posted in a parallel comment, but to make sure I'm not going easy on Qatar I'm going to assume they took place over 2 years.

6500 deaths over 2 years in a population of 2 million is a death rate of 162 per 100k.

I assume that the migrant workers skews young, so let us compare that to younger people elsewhere. I tried to compare to some of the countries that many of the migrant workers come from but had trouble finding non-paywalled data. So I'm just going to compare to the US.

The death rate in the US for males 15-24 is 100 per 100k. For 25-34 it is 177 per 100k. For 35-44 it is 257 per 100k.

The Qatar death rate then doesn't actually seem to be high. It seems to be reasonably inline with what you'd expect from the sheer large number of migrant workers there.

I think you’re confusing deaths of all causes vs deaths at work. Like I said in another comment, the Qatari construction firms expect deaths at work, so much so they asked someone I know to include it in custom made accounting software.

Improving working conditions vs letting workers die in Qatar is a curve they resolve towards letting workers die.

It would be interesting to compare working at Qatari construction vs other dangerous jobs.

What are they making the stadiums out of, lava?

They die of overheating since they had to do construction under extremely high temperatures.

I know someone who built tailor made accounting software for employee tracking involved in the process. This was 5-6 years ago. They did their usual thing but the client came back to them and said they were missing a column for “deaths”. They dutifully added one. He quit the company shortly after.

For them it’s just accounting. These are people from India, Bangladesh who work there under desperate conditions.

The migrant workers in construction are mostly from India, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Egypt.

If I were spending the money to go to that event, I would just buy a cheap Android phone just for these apps.

Of course, I would even go to that event, for many reasons.

There are probably RF bags you can stuff the phone into while not using it too.

Feels like half the cool kids are planning on boycotting this anyway

Do you feel the boycott is unwarranted? "The cool kids" is often a negative, mocking phrase.

"access to read, delete or change all content on the phone"... I would think if Android allows an app ability to do that then that's a huge security hole.

I don't even think that's real. Going off the permissions listed on the play store listing[1], I can't find any permission that remotely resembles "access to read, delete or change all content on the phone".

[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.moi.covid1...

I assume that Apps like TitaniumBackup or whatever they're called need such permission in order to make Backups of your phone, so it's not that worrysome to me that they exist at all. However, it's definitely weird that this World Cup app needs such permissions.

EDIT: Apparently TitaniumBackup needs root access, but I think my point about backups in general still stands.

Android apps can request access to /sdcard/ for things like file managers. Everything else needs root access, or using adb via USB

So this file access permission at most gives access to the whole /sdcard, which does not sound to me like it has to be a bad thing, right?

Kind of? /sdcard/ (a misnomer, it's just really a directory like /home/user/ on unix) perms are asked all the time by apps that don't need it at all because developpers don't understand that apps have their own config directory free of permissions, so they put stuff in /sdcard/ which triggers the perm popup.

In this case i'm worried because /sdcard/ perms give acces to all downloads, and all pictures, downloaded or taken. This, coupled with the UAEs track record concerning LGBTQ rights and digital surveillance, adding to the fact there is no discernable reason this app needs /sdcard/ access is troubling. Imagine installing the app, and getting put in prison because you have pictures with your gay partner on it.

Oh I would definitely also be worried about this specific app requesting this permission.

My questions about this permission are based on the other person saying "if Android allows an app ability to do that then that's a huge security hole". In this case it does seem like a security hole, but that can't be said as a general statement in my opinion.

But I have a Librem Phone ...

Something tells me you're not going to Qatar to attend the World Cup

I'd imagine it'd work similarly to Japan, which also requires a spyware app with wide-reaching permissions during your initial days in the country: you always have the option of picking up a rental phone (at your own cost) on arrival which you carry with you at all times during the mandated period.

That's fine -- they have plenty ankle bracelets on hand.

previously discussed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33212168

Covid is a God-given gift to oppressive regimes.

I had to install an app called ArriveCAN to enter Canada; although it's probably innocent compared to Qatar's, I unintalled it upon returning to the US.

Spyware is not scary, being tortured and killed by secret police is.

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2021/feb/23/r...

"oh, but Im not a poor migrant worker, wont happen to me!"

https://www.arabnews.com/node/2171901/middle-east

>A British travel industry expert found hanged in Doha in 2019 told friends he had been arrested and tortured by Qatari secret police 10 weeks before his death, The Times reported on Thursday.

>Marc Bennett, 52, had been hired by Qatar Airways to work on improving tourism to the Gulf country ahead of the 2022 FIFA World Cup.

Spyware and spying in general can help the regime to pick their targets, so it's indeed very scary.

That's bs btw. You don't have to install any of these 2.

Unlike many of you here with strict opinions, I'm actually going to the world cup.

>with strict opinions

Not really sure what you're trying to prove here.

As the Schneier says in the post:

Despite what the article says, I don’t know how mandatory this actually is. I know people who visited Saudi Arabia when that country had a similarly sketchy app requirement. Some of them just didn’t bother downloading the apps, and were never asked about it at the border

Well, surely you must install the app that holds your ticket to enter the stadium, and surely you must install the covid tracking app or be refused entry even with said ticket app? What are the alternatives?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com