alt Hacker NewsI'm pretty surprised at the amount of hate here. All the "just build it ourselves!" and "Google wants your data", and almost no top-level comments even discussing the difficulty of dealing with malware and social engineering.
There are at least three moral arguments that can be made:
- Google, as a capitalist company, is ignoring the privacy and FOSS implications, and is guilty of screwing the customer due to greed
- Regular, non-tech folks are constantly being robbed of their privacy, money, and/or identity through malware and social engineering attacks, and Google is guilty of not doing enough to protect them
- Enabling malware delivery and use props up criminals and known bad actors (e.g., north korean), and by not stopping this Google is guilty of supporting these bad actors
I'm not seeing either of those last two points being made strongly. Maybe it's just not the target audience — people here aren't as likely to be scammed, and few of us are regularly thinking about north korea — but I'd expect to see more consideration for the costs of inaction here.
It’s pretty common for techies to overestimate how widely their opinions and desires are shared. If you think a good chunk of the population wants to sideload apps, then this feels like an attack. But it’s really just a decision not to cater to a tiny fraction of the market. It’s the same thing in discussions about headphone jacks or small phones. People act like it’s nefarious, when really it’s just that their desire for those things is pretty uncommon.
Personally I think there should be a lot more work done on how to secure arbitrary apps from arbitrary sources so that they are unable to hurt people, rather than focusing so much on on preventing random apps from being installed in the first place. This would help the average person as well, since these walled gardens still make mistakes. But it’s not realistic to put a box in everyone’s pockets that’s three taps away from sending all their money to some dude in Laos.