> People who are unwilling to figure out the risks just should not use smartphones and the internet.

Sounds great in theory, but just today I was reminded how impossible this is when walking back from lunch, I noticed all the parking meters covered with a hood, labelled with instructions on how to pay with the app.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatchewan/city-of-regina-r...

This has nothing to do with keeping people safe. If it did then power users could continue to install their own software by being given that ability as a developer setting. The fact that some people are gullible enough to go into a hidden setting on their phone and enable that in order to install an app from a random Chinese website is not a good reason to take away everyone's freedom. Consolidation of power is all this is about.

> Ruining Android for everyone to try to maybe help some rather technologically-hopeless groups of people is the wrong solution.

This isn't about how skilled a person is, it is about tackling social engineering. The article gave the example of someone posing as a relative, it could also be a blackmail scheme, but it could also be the carefully planned takeover of a respected open source project (ahem, xz).

What I am saying is this sort of crime affect anyone. We simply see more of it among the vulnerable because they are the low hanging fruit. Raising the bar will only change who is vulnerable. Society is simply too invested in technology to dissuade criminals. Which is why I don't think this will work, and why I think going nuclear on truly independent developers is going to do more damage than good.

I was always under the impression security was a red herring and the real reason was control. Google wants to own the device and rent it to users with revocable terms the same way SaaS subscription software works. Locking down what can run is a key step in that process

Could the technophobes please just buy different smartphones? If certain people want to opt in to locked down devices, I think that's okay. But please give me a device that lets me do whatever I want. (And still lets me participate in modern society—I can't live with a Linux phone).

Apple's argument for locking down the iPhone but not the Mac has always been some variation of "Mac users are professionals and iPhones are for everyone." Fine! Where can I buy the unrestricted iPhone? As far as I'm concerned, basically every problem could be solved if Apple would put the Security Research Device on an unlisted page of their online store for the general public. Normies won't buy it, and I will.

I “get” technology so I understand how you got here.

But this is the wrong take. I expect to go to a restaurant and not die from the food… and I want nothing to do with the inner workings of the kitchen. I just want to know any restaurant I go into will be safe. Society has made restaurants safe, either because of government pressure or it’s good for business.

How is that not a fair ask for technology, too? We all have things we know well, and then there’s reasons we’re alive that we don’t even know exist because someone took care of it.

It’s unreasonable to only allow people to participate in society once they understand every nuance.

> People who are unwilling to figure out the risks just should not use smartphones and the internet.

That train has left the station decades ago. The internet has become an essential part of modern societies. People can't not use the internet (or smartphones), at least if they don't live in the woods.

> People who are unwilling to figure out the risks just should not use smartphones and the internet

People who aren't technically sophisticated should choose the smartphone ecosystem that was designed to offer the safety of a walled garden from the start.

Google sold Android as the ecosystem that gave users the freedom to do anything they like, including shooting themselves in the foot.

Google should not be allowed to fraudulently go back on their promise now that they have driven the other open ecosystems out of the marketplace.

I don't know if Google is making the right choice here, but I do believe that technology should be for anyone (anyone who wants it, at least).

How do you plan to decide who gets to use internet banking and who doesn't? That doesn't seem like a good road to be going down, either.

>Ruining Android for everyone

Are they really though? does the average person really care about side loading? I think we are in an echo chamber. I can't picture any of the people in my life installing things from outside of an app store on their phone. However I realize that's purely anecdotal, it would be nice to see actual statistics on this to have a more informed decision.

(some) people are starting to understand why cash is so important. It's the neutrality that it provides. The fact that it can't be programmatically limited or censored and you can't be excluded from the economy. Cash is inclusive. Obviously cash becomes much harder to "use" online and in apps...

Idiocracy needs a spiritual "sequel" with modern times.

open source alternative, at first it's going to suck. but over time it will win. imagine how miserable we would be if all we had was windows and osx. but we have linux. we are now at such crossroads were the choice is android and apple, we need a free alternative. much sooner than most realize the threat to freedom from big corps, govt and others will be so big that we would wish to have a free mobile OS. mobile is now the main computing platform and needs a free big corp alternative. it's true that some big corps would refuse to allow there apps to run on there like a bank, but that's okay! there will be alternatives ...

My take is quite different. Every device that I use to do internet banking or things of that nature, I'm very happy to delegate security to companies, and consider that already I trust said bank with my finances. If I want a device I "fully control", then I don't expect a bank to trust it, I don't expect to do internet banking on it or other sensitive stuff of that nature. And that's the status quo even with Google implementing this, open-source OSes still exist, just don't expect internet banking to happen on them.

Or people just learn it and if they screw up they learn from those mistakes.

This isn't about helping people, that's just the cover story.

This is about Google wanting more control over their ecosystem.

> to try to maybe help some rather technologically-hopeless groups of people

Even if they're the majority?

(Keep in mind that as average lifespan keeps getting longer while birth rates keep going lower, demographics will tend to skew older and older. Already happened in Japan; other developed countries will catch up soon.)

> They should probably not have a bank account at all and just stick to cash.

You know that these (mostly) don't fall into this category of being "hopeless with [modern] technology" because they're cognitively impaired, right?

Mostly, the people who most benefit by these protections, are just people 1. with full lives, who 2. are old enough that when they were first introduced to these kinds of technologies, it came at a time in their life when they already had too much to do and too many other things to think/care about, to have any time left over for adapting their thinking to a "new way of doing things."

This group of people still fully understands, and can make fluent use of, all the older technologies "from back in their day" that they did absorb and adapt to earlier in their lives, back when they had the time/motivation to do so. They can use a bank account; they can make phone calls and understand voicemail; they can print and fax and probably even email things. They can, just barely, use messaging apps. But truly modern inventions like "social media' confound them.

Old bigcorps with low churn rates are literally chock-full of this type of person, because they've worked there since they were young. That's why these companies themselves can sometimes come off as "out of touch", both in their communications and in their decision-making. But those companies don't often collapse from mismanagement. Things still get done just fine. Just using slower, older processes.

Yellowstone rangers taught us that building an effective anti-bear trash container is impossible because the top 10% of bears are smarter than the bottom 10% of tourists.

I like this idea. But last time I tried it the customer representative on the other line told me they were sorry but they could not accommodate my request at this time.

How is it unsustainable when iOS has enforced even stricter rules for its nearly 20 year lifespan?

> At this point I'm convinced that there's something deeply wrong with how our society treats technology.

The problem isnt with technology. The problem is with physical ownership versus copyright/trademark/patent ownership in abeyance of physical ownership.

I go to a store and buy a device. I have a receipt showing a legal and good sale. This device isnt mine, even if a receipt says so.

The software (and now theres ALWAYS software) isnt mine and can never be mine. My ownership is degraded because a company can claim that I didn't buy a copy of software, or that its only licensed, or they retain control remotely.

And the situation is even worse if the company claims its a "digital restriction", ala DMCA. Then even my 1st amendment speech rights are abrogated AND my ownership rights are ignored.

It would not be hard to right this sinking ship.

     1. Abolish DMCA.
     2. Establish that first sale doctrine is priority above copyright/patent/trademark
     3. Tax these 'virtual property rights'
     4. Have FTC find any remote control of sold goods be considered as fraudulently classified indefinite rental (want to rent? State it as such)

You live in a bubble. The roles are inversed. This is "ruining" Android for the 0.001% of power users that install .apk files and improving it for the huge chunk of population that are still getting hit by malicious ads that try to push app installs onto you.

Smartphones and the internet are really useful and convenient. Even if we could make it work, it seems quite rude to say that people should be excluded from it because we can't be bothered to make it safe.

Consider an older technology that became fundamental to much of daily life a century or two ago: writing. After a few millennia where literacy was a specialized skill, we pretty quickly transitioned to a society where it was essential for common activities. Rather than make sure everything had pictures and such to accommodate the illiterate, we tried to make it so that the entire population is literate, and came pretty close to succeeding. There are people who just outright can't read for whatever reason, but they're a very small minority and we aim to accommodate them by giving them assistance so they can get by in a literate world, rather than changing the world so you don't need to be able to read to live a normal life.

Rather than saying that half the population (a low estimate, I believe, for how many people will fall prey to malware in an anything-goes world) should abandon this technology, we should work to make it so they don't have to, with some combination of education and technological measures.

Consider that you, and most of the community here, wouldn't have jobs if that were the case. XD

Its not society, this is simply more fascism. Corperate and government cooperation to surviel and controll the masses.

So long as the 5g chips and the 2 mobile app stores remain under control, then 5 eyes has nearly full coverage.

Is this even the reason? If Android phonemakers are simply concerned about tech-illiterate users switching to iPhone, they could sell a locked-down Android phone that requires some know-how to unlock.

Start your own nation and then start your own company, then.

Nobody is forcing you to use a smartphone. If your work needs you to use some app, they’ll buy you a phone if they respect you.

If you’re so upset just stop using it. But you won’t.

> Ruining Android for everyone to try to maybe help some rather technologically-hopeless groups of people is the wrong solution.

Those groups of people are Google's paying customers. Google will, of course, defer to the ones who need more help to be safe online over the ones who don't. That's how you create a safe ecosystem.

'Only the educated elite should be permitted to use technology' is a great take, but unfortunately the peons outvote and outspend you, so their opinions matter more than yours.

I agree. In fact, one of the things I frequently propose is that we disallow the elderly and mentally disabled from using advanced technology without government proctor. In this way we can protect them. Everyone else can choose to turn off their scam protection.

People frequently talk about this with respect to AI and ads and how it’s bad for people to be use these things. I recommend we disallow the internet entirely for classes of people whose minds are not ready for the downsides of the tech.

With your Adderall prescription should come a phone number to sign up to the government proctoring service.

>They should probably not have a bank account at all and just stick to cash

Pretty much illegal in some parts of EU

Your mistake is taking Google's argument at face value. Protecting users is an outright lie, this is purely about control.

Google doesn't give one single shit if users download malware from the Play Store, but hypothetical malware from third party sources is so much worse that we need to ruin the whole OS? That doesn't pass the sniff test.

Google wants to make sure you can only download malware from developers who give google a cut. They want to control the OS and remove user choice. That's all it is. That's what it's always been about.

"Protecting users" is a pretense and nothing more. Google does not care at all about user safety. They aren't even capable of caring at this point. There are far, far cheaper and more effective ways to actually protect users, and google isn't doing any of them.

"We could make devices safe for everyone but this upsets freedom purists, so I've decided some people need to stay in the dark ages instead"

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> just should not use smartphones and the internet

That's ridiculous. Phones are being made more and more of a requirement to participate in society, including by governments.

Given how many tech savvy people here run OpenClaw or one of it’s copycats I wouldn’t be so harsh in my judgment.

what

I fully agree. Similar to killing bacteria with antibiotics, Attempting to idiot-proof machinery only leads to the creation of idiot-proofing-resistant idiots.

We need to move back to putting users back into full control. Machines (including computers) should ALWAYS respect the input of the user, even if the user is wrong.

If a person shoots themself with a gun as a result of their incompetence, we don't fault the gun manufacturer for not designing the gun to prevent auto-execution. If you can't operate a firearm safely, you shouldn't attempt to operate a firearm.

Similarly, if a person deliberately points their car a solid object and accelerates into it, the actions of the operator shouldn't be the car manufacturer's responsibility. We need to get rid of ESC, ABS, AEB, etc. These features have created a whole slew of drivers who speed headfirst into the back of stationary drivers and expect their car to stop itself. This works right up until a sensor fails and the operator flies through the windshield (usually people like this don't wear seat-belts). If you can't drive, you shouldn't be driving until you rectify your incompetence.

Similarly, phones and computers should respect user input. If a users wants root access to their personal device, they should be able to get root access. If a user runs "rm -rf --no-preserve-root /" as root, the device should oblige and delete everything, since that is what the operator instructed it to do. If you can't be trusted to use a computer, you shouldn't be using a computer until you rectify your incompetence.

The lack of accountability in modern society is disgusting, and it leads to much deeper societal problems when people refuse to better themselves and instead expect the world to shield them from their willful ignorance.

No, you have that backwards. A society is judged by how it treats its least able members. Android devices are primarily for mainstream users, not us. Technically adept users are the minority and we can deal with a few hoops to customize our phones the way we like.

It's selfish to advocate against better protections for the least able people in the world just for our own convenience.