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Comment by microtonal | Hacker News Reader

People use alternatives for many different reasons (or multiple at the same time):

- They might want privacy from Google. Using Google Pay probably doesn't make much sense.

- Security protection against Google. Google can remotely brick devices with unsandboxed Play Services. After blocking of ICC officials and all the Greenland threats, it's not odd that some European citizens would like to block this Google/US government attack vector.

- They want a clean phone without all kinds of crap like Gemini preinstalled.

- They want to reduce dependence on big tech/Google product in general.

In cases 2-4, using Google Pay with sandboxed Google Play services may be an acceptable compromise for convenience.

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Minor note, you forgot battery life. Pinging your location every other minute for traffic and crowd denisty for Google Maps, even using AGPS, isn't cheap.

When you find battery life randomly tanks for a few days, despite not changing anything in your life, it's always Google Play Services that end up being the culprit

Great point! For me that was not a reason to get a phone with GrapheneOS, but definitely a noticeable/welcome side-effect.

Is this an AI response? I get why people want a de-googled phone. What I don't get is why they would want to use tap to pay, one of the payment methods with increased attack vectors.

Is this an AI response?

No.

I hate AI writing, so I never use AI for writing. Randomly throwing in accusations in discussions sucks. I don't think my comment had any of the hallmarks of AI writing either, unless bulleted lists are also not-done these days.

I guess I should be happy that people don't recognize me as a non-native speaker anymore?

Nah, some people are just having too much !fun! witch-hunting.

The accusation was not random. That writing had an AI tone to it with the bulleting etc, and didn't address the actual point being questioned.

It did not have an AI tone, bullet points are not an indicator of AI, and it addressed the point well.

> with increased attack vectors.

I don't follow. If you mean against fraudulent spending phone based tap to pay is probably the most secure. It demands user authentication (biometric or code) for any transaction so there's no real way to trigger a fraudulent spend without the user knowing. Pretty much any other system allows for at least some amount of unauthorized spending if it's stolen.

If you just mean it's less private than I don't really know that it's terribly different than using a card. Especially if the ecosystem were open and you could choose your payment provider and not just have to use Google/apple.

You might want to look into NGate.

if I’m reading the source I found correctly, that has got nothing to do with Tap and Pay, where a virtual card is stored/emulated on device via the secure element, instead emulating an Contactless reader and relaying a real card pressed up against the device.

If anything, this attack is a benefit of mobile payments, where you need a second device to perform the attack with, and the user to use verify themselves for the payment to go through.

> Is this an AI response?

Probably not but you’re doing a bad job explaining what wanting to de-google your phone has to do with the choice of wireless payment methods.

It’s in the name, “de-googling”, not “de-attack-vectoring”. People want to break away from Google specifically. They’ll still use tap to pay because it’s convenient, secure enough, at least as private as any card/bank payment, and ideally not Google, which was what people de-googling want.

Well, why do people want to de-google? Likely peivacy and security. There is significant overlap in that reasoning and not doing tap to pay.

> There is significant overlap in that reasoning and not doing tap to pay.

Or using a (smart)phone, right? No need to go to extremes, cutting Google specifically is the win because they centralize the “spying”, not cutting the technology.

You’re stretching this for no good reason and trying to find a connection that doesn’t exist just to save your argument.

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