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Comment by hparadiz | Hacker News Reader

Don't you know? If one elderly person gets scammed we all deserve to be infantilized.

Wouldn't it be something if, given all the surveillance already in place, law enforcement punished the scammers instead of the innocent?

But then how would they police what you install?

Maybe you have the criminal idea of installing an adblocker, for example.

That is not allowed since corporations need to make money.

The government and ad networks need to track you for your benefit.

Ads are needed before listening to each minute of a song.

You must submit to crpyto miners running in the background from the ads, increasing your electricity bill and pollution.

Only USA sanctioned and approved ads are allowed, also. We wouldn't want you seeing an ad from a competing entity, right?

If you install an ablocker, you are a terrorist and broke 324582 American laws.

The scammers are often in a very different country than the victim. Finding the scammer is only 50% of the work, the other 50% is diplomacy and hoping the other side is willing to extradite. This is not made easier if the police force in the scammer's country is extremely corrupt.

This is why those scams so often rely on gift cards (or sometimes on cash which a local mule converts to crypto).

Many banking scams involve fake checks and deposits into other accounts, but I don’t see the government or banks taking active steps to stop them.

Maybe they can just sanction that person? Block them from making phone calls to the country and publishing apps?

(nevermind that the scams are extraordinarily likely to come through Meta, Google, Apple, Amazon)

The scams are likely to some from outside Play. In the US, these scams don't run because iPhone is the dominant platform and side loading in iOS is not possible. In the rest of world they are widespread.

Outside Play, on YouTube or via Google Ads for many of them. Likewise for Meta ads.

The scams that are happening in the rest of world are calls posing as bank support about urgent security issues and telling people to install apps to protect their accounts.

In the USA they tell you to install AnyDesk and remote access your computer. Or they just ask for your password. Or forge a check.

Does not sound like an Android problem. Maybe ask Microsoft or Apple about that.

All the scams are for apps that are already in the Play and App store.

Absolutely! Never had one problem with apps on FDroid. Not even when tbe Simple Mobile Tools suite was sold to a shady company without a heads up to its users. And that safety isn't an accident.

I don't disagree about that.

Ah, sorry there seem to be a lot of people that seem to think that side loading is an issue to anything other than Apple and Googles profit margins.

They let so much malware in their stores already.

Sideloading is very possible on iOS and there's an entire subculture surrounding it.

Not widespread enough to be a viable grift target.

And how much grift happens through Android side loading? (BTW, I hate that weasel word used to vilify a perfectly reasonable activity.) Practically all grift on Android happens through apps on the Play Store. People who know how to 'side load' are also usually careful and smart enough to think about what they're putting in. That's not a useful target for grifts either.

As somebody put it, Google goes after others without cleaning their own house first. It's just abuse of power at this point.

Apparently it's widespread in Asia and South America.

Are Debian repos a viable grift target?

What does that have to do with Android and iOS?

Free software protects from malware, not walled gardens.

If you don't want Play Store, don't use it?

"Google is slowly removing such option "for your safety", and "hackers" on this website really believe them.

You can still install any ROM you want. Not having Play Store has some downsides, but those trades offs should be familiar to a free software enthusiast.

You can only do this on a tiny number of devices supporting free drivers (and mainline kernel), otherwise you are tied to an ancient Linux kernel. I'm using Librem 5 btw and don't believe that Android, whose development completely depends on Google, is a viable long-term solution.

They absolutely are and that's why they're tightly curated by maintainers.

Exactly like... you guessed it... F-Droid. Not Google Play.

FDroid has 0.2% of app volume of Play Store.

Don't mistake obscurity for security. FDroid isn't the size to even be noticed by problems that Play Store and AppStore are dealing with.

This is exactly why I gave the example of Debian repos.

Which again work on a model of a single entity having all the curation power.

My point is that Google does not want to protect users by restricting "side loading". If they actually wanted that, they would remove all the malware in their store. They are just building higher walls in the walled garden to lock you in.

Right, but the Debian Developers don't prevent you from installing (installing, not "sideloading") other programs. If you want to install malware you're free to, but they don't distribute it.

F-Droid at least does a quick review to make sure there's nothing malicious in the app before adding it. Since we know Google does something similar and there is still malware on the Play Store one might reasonably conclude that Google doesn't actually care about malware.

Now, it might be a problem of vetting at scale or malware being really subtle, but if that's the case Google should focus on improving their process before locking down Android for "security".

"Likely"? Do you mean that based on actual data, or are you using it as a weasel word so you can present whatever convenient "facts" that benefit Google as truth?

I’m betting on the latter. No Kitboga video mentions custom Android apps. What actually appears on almost all videos are online ads/spam or fake celebrity accounts messaging random people on Facebook.

It's funny how you aggressively push solutions that ignore the most common scam vectors investigators encounter. Could it be a coincidence that your proposal conveniently places every aspect of people’s lives at the mercy of big businesses? Or that the scam vector you downplay, ads and social media, just happens to be cash cows for some of the richest companies in history?

We already have plenty of paid lobbyists cheering the transfer of wealth from the poorest to the richest. There's no need to do that dirty work for free. Weaponizing the elderly being scammed of their life savings while protecting those that benefit from it is beyond messed up.

My proposal? Who exactly do you think I am? lol

They don't want users to find out who's the real scammer.

Ha if we follow that to it's logical conclusion we should ban smartphones.

Ok, but the vast majority of people do need their hand held because they're incompetent, naive, or both. IMO this is pro consumer move

We shouldn't let naive or mentally disabled people to dictate how computing should work. That's the same logic behind the age verification shit that's happening worldwide.

If you (not you specifically) are unsure of your abilities to use computers, let a friend or a family member buy a dumbed down device for you or install parental controls or something. Or maybe have clicking the build number 7 times reveal "toddler mode" where you can lock your device down irreversibly as much as you want.

No. Society should not be holding the hands of adults. It's unnecessary and it's insulting.

It might be pro consumer if the power were lying in some kind of democratically justified organization, which then decides which apps are allowed and which are not.

This way, consumers are helpless victims of the same megacorporation, which will use its near-absolute power over the mobile ecosystem (shared with one other megacorporation) to profit on the back of consumers.

If Google actually wanted to protect people from malware, they would not approve Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, …

This is as pro-consumer as cutting off one's nose to cure a cold. Let me say this for the... I don't know how many times, that security, child protection, scam prevention, terrorism, miniaturization, sophistication, etc are all lies peddled by trillion-dollar megacorps to justify their cash grab, and by despotic governments to justify their consolidation of power over citizens. Nobody wants to know why all those problems still occur despite these unpopular measures. Meanwhile, NONE of those draconian restrictions on users' freedom and privacy are technically necessary to achieve any of those ideals. It's a lie that they convince the people by repeating incessantly.

This is 2026, for God's sake! How long has this grift been playing out? At least two decades? What will it take people, much less the tech savvy ones, to learn that all these are designs of greedy and power lusting minds?

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