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Comment by digiown | Hacker News Reader

This is really a human right issue. No one should be required to carry an attacker-controlled tracking device, especially not for interacting with the government. It's funny that the EU uses all this mobile attestation BS more than the US does. So much for sovereignty and consumer protection. No monopoly Google can build is as good as the government forcing you to accept their terms.

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>No one should be required to carry an attacker-controlled tracking device

What about being required to carry a your-own-government-controlled tracking device?

Because the US or Chine government can't harm me in Europe via the data they collect from me, But the EU authorities can if they want to, so naturally I fear them more if they were the ones hoovering my data.

What are the odds they're using this on-shore tech grab to implement their own domestic version of China's social credit score system, to easily get data on their own citizens who commit "wrong-think", without having to through the effort to twist the arm of US entities every time they want to do that?

Food for thought, but I do think we're living the last years of online anonymity, it's inevitable.

Tracking device might be the wrong thing to focus on. The US has other ways of messing with foreigners who depend on services provided by US companies, like suddenly cutting off those services in the case of ICC judges.

IIRC, ICC judges lost access to their O365 work email accounts. Worst the US can do to me is turn off my Steam, and Gmail but I can easily live without those.

Now imagine being debanked by your own government because they don't like what you're saying and becoming unemployed, homeless and dead. I don't think they're remotely comparable.

For example, a few years ago, a power tripping gov bureaucrat turned off my unemployment payments over a technicality. Luckily, I had enough money to pay a lawyer to sue them and won, but it was tight. What if I hadn't had the money to hire a lawyer? Since I was in a foreign country, with no family or close friends to fall back on. I was exclusively relying on the welfare state I paid into for years, that then turn its back on me for shits and giggles.

So I don't think you understand just how bad it can be for you if your government decides to turn on you and fuck with you, if you're comparing this to losing access to your work email account.

See the famous case of UK postal workers that got fucked by their government trying to hide their mistakes.

It's all the same. How is suing Google any different, if you instead get debanked by Google for violating their "terms"? The only solution is untraceable, permissionless money, like Monero. Why do you think governments try so hard to ban it?

> if you instead get debanked by Google for violating their "terms"

Since when is google a bank?

>The only solution is untraceable, permissionless money, like Monero. Why do you think governments try so hard to ban it?

Because untraceable currency is mostly used by criminals for crime.

Your bank (like most European ones) requires you to pass attestation to use their services. If you don't accept Google/Apple's terms, you can't access it without extreme difficulty.

I can always access my bank via a web browser or even in person at the teller at a branch somewhere, or as a last resort via snail mail from attorney, but most importantly even if I get locked out somehow by google, the account still runs and I won't be homeless as my salary and rent auto-payments keep going regardless if you can access it or not.

How is this comparable to your government debanking you meaning that no bank, landlord, layer or job will touch you?

It's less severe for sure, but I'd rather live without undue interference based on someone else's whims, unless I broke a law.

I... don't think you understand debanked. There is no movement OUT of your account. Deposits will be processed all day long. The intent is to tie up access to as many of your assets as possible. If you think anything of yours will just keep on going if you end up debanked, you're sadly mistaken. In addition, based on the U.S. Bank Secrecy Act as amended by the PATRIOT act, covered entities are forbidden from disclosing to you anything about why your account is frozen.

It's as close as you get to a complete shunning from modern society. You're reset to the cash you hold on you and keep custody of. And yes. In the U.S., the list that manages who can and cannot transact is centralized under OFAC. So it is at the whims of Executive whether or not any financial activity can be done with you.

The premise here is that you lose access to a European bank's mobile app because the US government compels Apple or Google to disable your app store accounts. Not that your relationship with the bank is frozen.

the account still runs and I won't be homeless as my salary and rent auto-payments

Luckily in most European countries renters are protected and they cannot just kick you out of your home for missing one rent payment (IANAL, but in NL it requires 3 months of no pay and a judge has to approve). Most likely they wouldn't approve if you missed a payment because you were locked out of your banking account.

My bank's app uses Google Pay to pay at POS terminals, so Google can at least block that.

Being de-Googled is a hardship, though there are replacements for virtually all its services. I acknowledge you are well informed on this topic.

It is not unreasonable for governments to pursue avenues for laundering money. I recognize that you likely don't believe governments should prosecute money laundering, but that view is not aligned with the majority of citizens in your country.

After a fair trial and appeals process, right?

Ah money laundering, the government's 2nd favorite excuse to bypass due process, remove freedom, and impose arbitrary punishments, after "emergency" and before "think of the children".

The government can prosecute money laundering and all the other crimes, but it's not an excuse to impose extrajudicial punishment. Until they stop, having some cash and crypto is your only means of defense.

I understand your threat model is centered around the risk of a government persecuting you. This will naturally conflict with incentives of people whose threat model centers around a lower severity but higher frequency event of systematic violence performed by criminal enterprises, with a necessary condition being ease of moving money. Both representative and totalitarian governments seek to aid investigation of criminal activity by following the movement of money.

I'm unsure about your reference to extrajudicial punishment, is it referring to de-banking associated with AML and KYC regimes in the US? If so, I agree that unjust things are unjust. I believe we should seek to fix those injustices directly through lobbying lawmakers, rather than rejecting an entire system that has significant security benefits.

I am sympathetic to people who have a fatalistic attitude when it comes to political reforms. Having other financial instruments as a backup is a good practice.

I'm not necessarily opposed to KYC or even government being able to audit transactions in general. But there is too few legal protections both from the bank and the from the government itself for this to be acceptable in a free society.

It's not entirely hopeless I guess. For what it's worth, the US government recently issued an EO that purportedly stops banks from debanking you for political reasons. Hopefully a future administration would take care of the other part.

Because financial sanctions are one of our main tools to pressure enemy countries into calming the fuck down in hopes of avoiding an actual kinetic conflict.

In 2025, North Korea managed to steal from the world over 10% of its GDP worth in cryptocurrency.

According to AP News (https://apnews.com/article/international-court-sanctions-tru...) at least one judge had his bank accounts closed. So it's not just your own government who can debank you in Europe.

Of course in this judge's case there might still be some banks who are willing to work with him even at the risk of getting sanctioned as there weren't language in the news that he was completely debanked which I assume they would highlight if it was the case.

The main problem IMHO that a bank access not seen as a right. Even Russia which is neither powerful (unlike the US) nor an EU ally can de-bank Russian critics living in the EU (and other places) by reporting them to FATF. AML is ripe for abuse.

> IIRC, ICC judges lost access to their O365 work email accounts. Worst the US can do to me is turn off my Steam, and Gmail but I can easily live without those.

They lost access to everything american, including Visa and Mastercard. It's in french and maybe not the best source but it's not paywalled :

https://www.tf1info.fr/international/nous-sommes-attaques-le...

> "Payments are mostly cancelled," he continued, "as almost all cards issued by banking institutions in Europe are either Visa or Mastercard, which are American companies."

They are not completely debanked since they can go to the bank and withdraw cash, but it's a crippling situation to be in.

You most likely use a Windows PC and an Android phone. If Uncle Sam viewed you as a threat actor, he could ask both companies to send you a signed and verified update to either your OS or apps they control, running whatever he wants.

> Now imagine being debanked by your own government because they don't like what you're saying and becoming unemployed, homeless and dead. I don't think they're remotely comparable.

You don't have to imagine it.

Alina Lipp, Thomas Röper, Xavier Moreau, Col Jacques Baud, Nathalie Yamb. The last two are Swiss nationals. The Baud case is interesting because he's a Belgian resident who now can not even buy food or pay his bills while living in his own home.

The odds are very low. It all depents on the people. So far, the European citizens are very privacy senstive. The European institutions are characterized by a huge devision of power. There is no chance that European instutitions can impose their will against a considerable majority of people. If people turn away from liberal democracy, that's another matter. But then everything is lost anyway.

> There is no chance that European instutitions can impose their will against a considerable majority of people

The EU commission just passed chat control to have government mandated software in every phone

If you want to over simplify at least do it right.

It's substantially neutered from the original proposal, with most of the scary parts taken out. I'd count that as a win as far as how antidemocratic the EU commission is.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/12/after-years-controvers...

Given how many world leaders form the west had absolutely the most vile chats with Epstein about doing despicable things to people, I'd totally want chat control but only for our leaders. They certainly proved that's who needs it the most to keep us safe.

Do you have a citation for this? I can't find anything showing that 2022/0155(COD) has passed the EU Council or Parliament (nor can I find any scheduled votes). [1]

The most recent related information I could find was some movement to extend the temporary derogation of the ePrivacy Directive, which expires on 2026/04/03, to 2028/04/03 but even that did not seem to have passed yet. [2]

The very fact they're trying to extend the temporary derogation hints to me that they think it'll take some time yet to pass Chat Control (if at all).

[1] https://oeil.europarl.europa.eu/oeil/en/procedure-file?refer...

[2] https://oeil.europarl.europa.eu/oeil/en/procedure-file?refer...

> So far, the European citizens are very privacy senstive.

In some areas, sure - like GDPR.

In other areas, absolutely not - like chat control.

As another commenter pointed out, it seems as if government mandated privacy intrusion is OK, while violations by corporations are quickly shutdown. It’s like the opposite of how it works here in the US.

>it seems as if government mandated privacy intrusion is OK

Once you give people an outside boogieman(Putin, Trump, Covids, etc) or a self inflicted false flag crisis(surge in violent crime rates for example) to shake them up to their core and put the fear in them, you can then easily sell your intrusion of privacy in their lives and extension of the police state, as the necessary solution that protects them.

When you start lose control of your people because their standard of living has been going downhill for 2 decades and they realize the future prospects aren't any better so they hate you even more, you can regain control of them by rallying them up on your side in a us-versus-them type of game against external or internal aggressors that you paint as "the enemy". The media is your friend here. /s

This isn't an EU or US exclusive issue, it's everywhere with a government issue. The difference as to why the EU people seem to be more OK with government intrusion compared to the US, is that EU always has external aggressors the government can point to as justification for invasiveness and control, while the US has been and still is the unchallenged global superpower so it has no real external threats ATM, meaning division must be manufactured internally (left vs right, red vs blue, woke vs maga, skin color vs skin color, gender vs gender, etc) so that the ruling class can assert control in peace.

Either way, we all seem to be heading towards the same destination.

Amen to that.

I agree 100%. Europe is just ahead of us for the time being, but our turn is soon approaching...

You may say that, but last I checked, we don’t get stopped and shot in the streets by masked goons on government payrolls.

Sure, but I am talking about government-mandated surveillance through legislation.

Also, your police aren’t afraid to go the extra mile to quash dissent. Look at what’s happening in the UK for example with Palestine Action. The only difference is that they are less armed and better trained.

Remember how UK is not a part of the EU anymore for about a decade by now?

Pedantry at its finest. The UK is European and you know it - regardless of the technicalities.

Since you’re a pedant, look at what Germany is doing in this same area.

Oh boy, did I hurt your feelings or something? If you call this pedantry, I'll gladly be a pedant in your perception. I'll call you ignorant in return though. And since you are an ignorant (notice how I can also take an adjective and ascribe it to your whole personhood?) you probably won't know what the difference between Europe and the European Union is anyway, so there's little hope for a fruitful discussion.

> chat control

The Danish proposal for indiscriminate chat control did not receive enough support and was retracted last autumn. Similar proposals have been put forward regularly over the past 30 years and have so far come to nothing just as regularly.

The problem is they will keep trying just like before, and they only need to get lucky once to succeed, while we need to be lucky very single time.

This is a truism, but not that helpful. I have to be lucky every time I leave the house not to be murdered, but it doesn't substantially change my behaviour. Rather than freaking out or catastrophising we just need to focus on asserting and celebrating and educating citizens in our shared values (murdering is bad, privacy is important).

Nah, I think in this metaphor we need to lock up Mr.Stabby McStabFace instead of just allowing him to go without punishment for his repeated efforts to legalize face-stabbing.

> chat control

For the conservative (and sometimes not so conservative) non-experts things like this sound like an easy win. So every new generation of politicians has to be educated about it again.

> like chat control.

That has never been passed in any form.

> the opposite of how it works here in the US.

It appears that you have conveniently forgotten about FISA, EARN IT, CLOUD act, PATRIOT act, LAED, etc, etc.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/12/after-years-controvers...

It hasn’t been passed in that “voluntary” form either.

35 years ago, a good chunk of the current EU was under a Soviet-imposed totalitarian rule. Spain was a dictatorship until 1975. And it's been just 80 years since WWII.

It always boggles my mind that most Europeans are absolutely convinced that nothing like that could ever happen again. Meanwhile, many people in the US are convinced that the government will be coming for them any minute now.

> It always boggles my mind that most Europeans are absolutely convinced that nothing like that could ever happen again.

It’s not that it cannot happen again. It’s that the EU is explicitly built against that and if it happens it will come from the national governments (see Hungary), not the EU.

> it will come from the national governments (see Hungary), not the EU.

what's the difference? The EU relies on national gov't to enforce rules. Until the EU becomes a sovereign entity with standalone enforcement mechanisms, it's no more able to ensure things can't happen than the UN.

>it's no more able to ensure things can't happen than the UN

It's not the same. EU will cut your funding if you don't follow their rules. UN is not finding any EU countries, but the opposite, we all pay to fund the UN.

National governments are often at odds with the commission. France was regularly threatened and fined for its energy policy, for example, which was not pro-business enough. All EU regulations are the result of horse trading in the council of ministers and the commission, the member states are not helpless victims or perfect enforcement forces blindly applying what the president of the commission of the day wants.

Maybe in theory, but the idea that nations that trade doesn’t go to war is a naive one, it has happened plenty and will happen again. As for the structure of voting etc, it’s just a matter of pushing until people give up.

Indeed, which is why entanglement goes deeper than simply trade. The emergence of pan-European companies like Airbus makes the cost for one country to go alone much steeper. Same for the establishment of EU-wide supply chains. There are also incentives to play nice in the form of the customs union and the single market. The moment you leave, you’re on the wrong side of a trade barrier.

How is the EU built against that and how does it matter?

The EU is built on rules that uphold liberal democratic principles, agreed to by national governments in a flush of post-WW2 clarity, and which tie successors to the same principles. There are exit mechanisms, but they impose large costs (i.e. Brexit).

You're saying nothing concrete in particular. What rules? How do they inhibit change? The only thing I can think of which is actually difficult to change is the echr and i see more than a dozen mostly liberal governments queueing up to change it (to little effect so far) over migration issues.

The ECHR isn't actually an EU thing. (It's a Council of Europe thing, which is separate from and predates the ECSC/EEC/EU.)

I know and it's a requirement for being in the EU still.

There are rules about election conduct and free operation of courts, to give two examples. Both of which Hungary skirts on occasion but the EU does apply some pressure.

> It’s that the EU is explicitly built against that and if it happens it will come from the national governments (see Hungary)

So to prevent individual EU nations ever becoming authoritarian, like Hungary, we have to cede sovereignty and authority to the EU & EC unelected bureaucrats like Ursula VDL who take over as the main executive leaders, ensuring we'll no longer have the danger of national-level authoritarianism.

Hell of a solution.

Surely the better solution to issues like Hungary is ensuring we get more democracy to Hungarian people, not giving authority over Hungary to someone else the Hungarian people can't elect.

US Supreme Court Judges are not elected. Although I hesitate to use this as an example currently, given how well the US separation of powers is (not) working, the point stands that all democratic systems need some kind of "damping" influence to survive. If successive national governments were hostile to EU bureaucrats there are options open to them to restore sovereignty — e.g. exit the EU, or force change in appointments by coordinating with other EU governments. The fact that senior positions in the EU are unelected does not in itself make the system un or anti democratic.

> So to prevent individual EU nations ever becoming authoritarian, like Hungary, we have to cede sovereignty and authority to the EU & EC unelected bureaucrats like Ursula VDL who take over as the main executive leaders, ensuring we'll no longer have the danger of national-level authoritarianism.

Not really, and the example of Hungary shows that it would not be that effective for that purpose.

The EU is a union of nations, not really of people. It was built so that nations play nice with each other. Each member state still does more or less what it wants within its borders, as long as it does not jeopardise the union.

In that way it’s not perfectly democratic, because there are layers of indirection between the citizens and the institutions.

Commissioners are nominated by member states and approved by parliament. So they are generally aligned with the politics dominant at the national level and palatable to MEPs. Von der Leyen is there because she had support from the German government and was from the dominant block in parliament. It’s not direct democracy, but it is not a faceless blob either.

> Meanwhile, many people in the US are convinced that the government will be coming for them any minute now.

It's a bit ironic that most of those people voted for Trump, who is now doing exactly that. But I guess they think it's ok as long as the government is coming for others, not for them (at least not yet)...

While I love the premise that he is choosing arbitrary groups to go after and we just haven't been chosen yet, no, he campaigned on this and was elected for exactly this. This is what the people want.

Sort of correct but also playing with words. Most, many.

There's a divide between generations and geographies to start with. Younger vs. older generations see things differently. Westerners vs. Easterners (especially those who remember the communist times) see things differently.

It's very hard to say what many and most people are doing on either side of the Atlantic. Until a few short years ago you wouldn't have imagined enough Americans would vote for the leader they did, knowing exactly what they're getting, and yet they did. So people aren't always forthcoming about their views and beliefs.

In Europe for anyone who can't remember the "hard times" it's easy to fall into the trap of believing things will stay good forever. The US hasn't had equivalent "hard times" relative to the rest of the world for as long as any person in the US has been alive and a few generations more. So they too can easily believe things can't turn sour, which is why this recent and swift downturn caused so much shock and consternation. But the US also always had a lot of preppers and people "ready to fight the Government" (that's why so many have guns, they say). It's a big place so you expect to have "many" people like this.

In Italy were already trying to break that division of power, we’ve a referendum that does just that

Very privacy sensitive? In Germany, maybe. Elsewhere in Europe, not so much. See the regular attempts to push through something like chat control.

> citizens are very privacy senstive

Their reaction and opposition to ChatControl (or near complete lack of both) would indicate otherwise? They could hardly care less about privacy.

National governments which have openly declared that believe they have the right to unlimited access to any private communication hardly lost any popularity or faced real consequences.

Every government is an attacker.

> What are the odds they're using this on-shore tech grab to implement their own domestic version of China's social credit score system, to easily get data on their own citizens who commit "wrong-think", without having to through the effort to twist the arm of US entities every time they want to do that?

What are the odds that once shut down "chat control" will come up under a new name?

> without having to through the effort to twist the arm of US entities every time they want to do that?

Right now, it's more like US corpos are try to twist the arm of EU governments [1][2], pushing heavy propaganda to manipulate our elections [3], allying with the US government to do so. And the US government has been threatening EU govts with invasion [4], leveraging US corpos to harm lawful individuals doing their jobs in the EU [5], and sanctioning elected officials for performing their duties [6], or threatened to [7].

Sure, there's an hypothetical risk of the EU turning sour. On the other hand, when it comes to US corpos, the risk has materialized.

[1]: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cly930y90lro [2]: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c0589g0dqq7o [3]: https://www.politico.eu/article/twitter-faces-renewed-scruti... [4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenland_crisis [5]: https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2025/11/19/n... [6]: https://www.brusselstimes.com/1931733/eu-parliament-blasts-u... [7]: https://www.politico.eu/article/us-accused-threats-eu-diplom...

Read your third link, please. The Ministry of Truth not being happy that their policy on "disinformation" isn't being applied as strongly as they wish isn't what I'd call "pushing heavy propaganda".

Yep. Color me shocked that the propaganda state media is unhappy with information being spread that doesn't conform to the views of the state, and so calls it propaganda or mis-/dis-information.

It's totally not the "ministry of truth".

GP means "Ministry of Truth" in the Orwellian-sense. The "Ministry of Truth" was the propaganda arm of the government just as the "Ministry of Love" is the interrogation/torture and brainwashing center.

> Because the US or Chine government can't harm me in Europe via the data they collect from me

That's an amusingly naïve perspective. The US government absolutely can harm you, via a multitude of ways.

Also, Chinese-owned firms are known to be transferring EU citizens' data to China in violation of GDPR: https://noyb.eu/en/tiktok-aliexpress-shein-co-surrender-euro...

China's government has strategic goals to destabilise and weaken the EU, and data-farming will be part of their strategy.

Not to speak of russia who have been sending assassins to kill people in the EU for a long time, and the EU has not been very good at stopping those.

> What about being required to carry a your-own-government-controlled tracking device?

What part of the cellphone manufacturer being based overseas makes you think the government can't track you via it?

Even leaving asides 5-eyes style data-sharing agreements, your US/Chinese smartphone still connects through a domestic cellphone carrier, using a domestic number. That's enough to have at a minimum fine-grained location tracking, call logs, and data usage.

In fact 5g and all previous standards have a provision for lawful intercept. So your domestic intelligence service and police can always turn it into a listening device.

Yeah it seems that some politicians have noticed that they can enact a lot of self serving authoritarian legislation that wouldn't fly otherwise if they push it as populist independence-from-US thing. Can't let a good crisis go to waste, of course.

One only needs a few looks at what the EU Commission has been doing lately to see that if left unchecked their plan is a UK-like total surveillance state.

I don't disagree but that wasn't the point here. The point is they are handing even more control to a different US entity. Putting my tinfoil hat on, I assume the authoritarians are intending to simply buy the data from the American companies to circumvent legal restrictions, as in the Five Eyes arrangement.

The real human-rights issue, in my view, is optionality. If interacting with government or the financial system requires a specific proprietary device tied to a specific ecosystem, that's a problem

Carrying this device is the key here. Eventually we all need to carry it around, track us everywhere.

Most people have mobile phones that need to roughly know your position as a technical necessity, why are you speaking like its 1990's?

Not just the phone needing to know your location, your rough location has to be reported to a central server, because that's how incoming calls/texts are routed to the phone.

I can leave my phone at home and route SMS and voice via http to my real phone.

You are shifting the goal posts here - if we work by this argument, we will never achieve anything.

There's a certain amount of conspiracy theory going on in this thread, but it it right to ask: who will be banned from this payment system, and under what rules? Can we make it a legal requirement to at least provide a justification which can be challenged?

The usual first victims are sex workers, not political minorities.

> It's funny that the EU uses all this mobile attestation BS more than the US does

Attestation in on itself isn't unwarranted which (to me) is an important security measure. Attestation as commonly implemented on Android via Play Integrity (the way banking apps are known to do) is restrictive, sure: https://grapheneos.org/articles/attestation-compatibility-gu... / https://archive.is/snGEu

An important security measure for who, though? The servers at the bank should "never trust the client" in case the attestation is bypassed or compromised, which is always a risk at scale.

If it's an important safety measure _for me_, shouldn't I get to decide whether I need it based on context?

I think it's fair for banks to apply different risk scores based on the signals they have available (including attestation state), but I also don't want the financial system, government & big tech platforms to have a hard veto on what devices I compute with.

It's an anti-brute-force mechanism. It's not for you, it's for all the other accounts that an unattested phone (or a bot posing as an unattested phone that just stole somebody's credentials via some 0-day data exfiltration exploit) may be trying to access.

Sure, banks could probably build a mechanism that lets some users opt out of this, just as they could add a Klingon localization to their apps. There just isn't enough demand.

If you work on mobile apps you will notice that full attestation is too slow to put in the login path. [This might be better than it used to be, now in 2026].

I don't think a good security engineer would rely on atty as "front line" anti brute force control since bypasses are not that rare. But yeah you might incorporate it into the flow. Just like captchas, rate limiting, fingerprints etc and all the other controls you need for web, anyway.

I know I'm quibbling. My concern is that future where banks can "trust the client" is a future of total big tech capture of computing platforms, and I know banks and government don't really care, but I do.

> total big tech capture of computing platforms

Correct. And the end of ownership, privacy, and truth too. If something can betray you on someone else's orders, it's not yours in the first place. You'll own nothing and if you aren't happy, good luck living in the woods.

> you work on mobile apps you will notice that full attestation is too slow to put in the login path

Hm, Play Integrity isn't that slow on Android, from my experience.

> don't think a good security engineer would rely on atty as "front line" anti brute force control since bypasses are not that rare

I'm not privy to device-wide bypasses of Play Integrity that ship with Trusted Execution Environment (which is pretty much all ARM based Androids), Secure Element, and/or Hardware Root of Trust, but I'd appreciate if you have some significant exploit writeups (on Pixels, preferably) for me to look at?

> My concern is that future where banks can "trust the client" is a future of total big tech capture of computing platforms

A valid concern. In the case of smart & personal devices like Androids though, the security is warranted due to the nature of the workloads it tends to support (think Pacemaker / Insulin monitoring apps; government-issued IDs; financial instruments like credit cards; etc) and the ubiquity & proliferation of the OS (more than half of all humanity) itself.

> Insulin monitoring apps

A monitoring app doesn't even interact with systems you don't own. Just put a liability disclaimer for running modified versions.

> warranted

Decided by whom? And why is Google trusted, not me? At minimum, I shouldn't face undue hardship with the government due to refusing to deal with a third party, unless we first remove most of Google's rights to set the terms.

> A monitoring app doesn't even interact with systems you don't own. Just put a liability disclaimer for running modified versions.

This is unserious when Insulin overdose can be fatal.

> And why is Google trusted, not me?

(Hardware-assisted) Attestation on Android doesn't require apps to "trust Google".

> I'm not privy to device-wide bypasses of Play Integrity that ship with Trusted Execution Environment (which is pretty much all ARM based Androids), Secure Element, and/or Hardware Root of Trust, but I'd appreciate if you have some significant exploit writeups (on Pixels, preferably) for me to look at?

Hi, you don't have the break the control on the strongest device. You only have to break it on the weakest device that's not blacklisted.

The situation is getting better as you note, but in the past the problem was that a lot of customers have potatos and you get a lot of support calls when you lock them out.

> think Pacemaker / Insulin monitoring apps; government-issued IDs; financial instruments like credit cards; etc

I agree with you on the need for trustworthy computing. I mainly disagree on who should ultimately control the trust roots.

We can only hope they continue to be found so there would at least be a small cost for this kind of indignity.

> Insulin monitoring apps

Funny that you say that, but the so far best artificial pancreas that is completely free and open source will soon be much harder to install to any Android phone without every user getting a valid key from Google.

In Germany, doctors even recommend these tools if they work. Because they make patients who know what they are doing healthier and more safe.

Naturally me and hundreds of other diabetics have already contacted our EU representative due to the changes Google is planning to make in their platform.

https://androidaps.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

This tool has literally saved my life.

It isn't that these tools are not useful, just that successful exploits on those may be fatal for the enduser.

> important security measure

It's a security measure against the owner of the device, in other words, an attack. Would you be okay with me using a remote control to forcibly slow down your car so I can merge? Using attestation this way is fundamentally incompatible with ownership. If the bank wants some assurance about a device, they need to sell or issue one to me, like credit cards or point of sale machines, which are explicitly not your property.

The fact that the assurance is provided by a third party you have little recourse against just adds insult to injury.

> If the bank wants some assurance about a device, they need to sell or issue one to me, like credit cards or point of sale machines, which are explicitly not your property.

In this example, a banking app is not making the entire Android device non functional when it refuses to work when remote attestation like Play Integrity fails.

It is colluding with a third party to increase their power. What devices pass Play Integrity? Yeah, the same ones with all the telemetry and spying that you can't remove. I thought the government is supposed to protect consumer rights, not to tilt the playing field even further.

Like I said, I'd be fine if they offer a viable alternative, like a card or a physical authentication dongle (which doesn't require spyware to use).

I don't want to depend on google and android for EU mobile attestation or the like. I didn't think anyone wants government enforced duopolies.

>against the owner of the device

Would you consider MFA to be a measure against you, the owner of the device, because it makes it harder for you to login?

>If the bank wants some assurance about a device, they need to sell or issue one to me

They are offering you free software and are operating under a security model tied to these specific devices. You're still free to walk into their branches, or use their physical cards, if you prefer not use their limited selection of devices.

>Would you be okay with me using a remote control to forcibly slow down your car

Car manufacturers do this as well though. Some of this is for the benefit of their customers (preventing theft from easily cloned keys). Some of this is not for customer benefit, like locking down infotainment systems.

Banks however are only interested in preventing fraud.

> MFA to be a measure against you

Not really, unless the MFA involves the same type of attestation involved in the process. TOTP is fine, and you can put it in your password manager to avoid phones, and can be done without consenting to any spying. And I don't really own the account anyway.

> use their physical cards

The premise of this discussion is these will get replaced by the hostile phone app, since the Europeans are too lazy to make a proper replacement.

> locking down infotainment systems

I don't agree with that either, but you can presumably buy a car without one, and you'd still be allowed to drive. What if the government says, you can't drive anymore UNLESS you use the locked down infotainment system and consent to all the ads/spying that comes with it?

> Would you consider MFA to be a measure against you, the owner of the device, because it makes it harder for you to login?

In theory - of course, it shouldn't make it any harder for _me_ to login, it's just that in practice the friction is inevitable since it can't distinguish between me and someone else without it.

> You're still free to walk into their branches, or use their physical cards, if you prefer not use their limited selection of devices.

The point is that this freedom is going away. I'd absolutely want to use their physical cards (there are smartcards with e-ink displays which would be a great thing for confirming payments), but no, they're slowly taking this away, starting by limiting transfers done without their mobile app.

And _their_ mobile app needs to invade __my__ property by locking down the system. I understand this might be neccessary to ensure the UI can be trusted, but this shouldn't happen on my device as it restricts my ability to do completely unrelated things.

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