This is something that worries me. I know that the laws/constitution that guarantees the rights of somebody may vary from country to country (and may not even be enforced by the letter), but lets say: All commercial companies will have a ToS, data sharing agreements, etc. You, as a user, i assume is not obligated to agree to that ToS at the expense of not using the service. If a government body requires you to use their service to access basic services (and offers no 'offline' alternative) required by law, are they, by proxy, coercing you to accept a commercial ToS? I would very much like to hear a lawyer opinion on this.
I know some government may do this with intent, but i imagine many governments simply never thought about it, or no citizen ever didn't accepted a "popular smartphone OS provider's ToS" and challenged that government requirement. I know some make offline alternatives very inconvenient, but that still technically legal.
That's exactly what i think it is. Have a legion of users willingly scraping the internet for you, going behind captchas, logins, and all the mechanisms that was put there to stop bots. With this every user user of the browser is also a bot. Now i wonder if the agent string will be something unique, and certain places will just block those browsers from their websites by it.
That's something that drives me crazy as well. I don't actually use the big 'algorithmic social media' sites, only Telegram and Discord mostly, and seeing screenshots/memes with those words censored there made me wonder why, at first. Then i saw people auto-censoring themselves in those places where there's no such thing as algorithmic de-ranking. The social media generation already find it normal, acceptable, and is specially ironic to me that a lot of people who are vocal against those services have conformed to what they say to stand against.
That behavior also highlights how people within those services care so much about reach, clout, 'going viral', instead of communicating with other people.
> At present the project is focused on mobile platforms, specifically Android and iOS, as they cover the vast majority of users and real-world use cases. (..) Desktop support is not currently within the project's scope.
This is the equivalent of a "Do you guys not have phones??"[1] but on a way larger scale.
At least where i live i am able to use the bare minimum of phones, even working with tech. The friction is increasing though, which worries me a lot, and day after day there is a new attempt to shove it down your throat if you want to be considered a member of society. Seeing that a lot of countries (including mine) are pushing for age verification, and the whole thing about Android blocking 'sideload', by the end of 2026 you won't be considered a human being without a government certified smartphone.
I do find it interesting that in an attempt to bring more people into modern society (via ability to access everything from an inexpensive smartphone), we're creating a stratification in society.
My brother hates tech more than me, and only has an old flip phone. I'm always surprised by the random problems he runs into as a result. Unresponsive desktop sites that beg you to download apps are the worst.
How is it that in todays day and age websites can be broken on desktops and favours smartphones? They are at best a compromised ux. Small screens and they are awkward to type on. Those are inherent limitations which are unlikely to change anytime soon. folding phones are a niche item and are likely to stay that way for the forseeable future. Tactile touchscreens will only mitigate the inherent drawbacks not solve them. The other solution is of course wearables like ar but not surprisingly people are stubbornly resisting buying them. I'm not sure what Apple and Meta were even thinking. What else is there? Projected holograms in 3d like in movies? I'm not yet ready for my entire world to turn blue.
Another recent news about mandated app use: Ryanair now (from November) requires using their app for the boarding pass, no more printouts from the desktop. Also, they refuse to show the QR code for the boarding pass in a mobile browser via the website, you must use their app.
No, sending a pdf by email is no extra cost. They already have an email output interface for tickets and recipts and confirmations.
It's all about better tracking. I'm not quite sure what additional info they get exactly, but tons and tons of mobile websites (that work and don't get deleted) are close to unusable due to a barrage of popups telling you to use the app (e.g. Reddit and other socials).
Also there is no indication they will stop the mobile web version. Already today the mobile web version is there but it explicitly refuses to show the boarding pass QR code: https://i.redd.it/lj3wdnfp9mq91.jpg
Not just tracking - also a chance to spam you with notifications until you figure out how to block them, and free ad space on your home screen in the form of the app icon.
It doesn't need to be by email. They can simply show it in the mobile website.
But they refuse to do so in order to get all that data which they can sell. In a mobile app it's way harder to run ad blockers and much easier to sneakily collect information on the user. Especially on android which is by far the biggest OS in the countries where Ryanair operates.
I really doubt it's that, as opposed to the maintenance cost of an extra flow to a boarding pass. Or perhaps just a perceived complexity/annoyance cost when something breaks in the desktop flow here and there.
I'd think it's only maybe 5-10% of customers at most who both use desktop over mobile to get their boarding pass and use an ad-blocker on desktop. And honestly I don't remember ever seeing an ad (even on Ryanair) when getting my boarding pass on mobile. OTOH I distinctly remember seeing many giant ads on printed boarding passes, most often on printed boarding passes brandished by other customers (usually printed in full color!). I'd think that's hugely more valuable as advertising real estate than the iota of additional data they get to collect on a few adblock users who have been forced to use mobile.
>I'm not quite sure what additional info they get exactly
probably more guaranteed location tracking - hey this guy is buying tickets from the expensive part of town on the newest model iPhone! Chance we can jack up the price, 99% good!
I don’t often log in to HN to comment, but when I do it’s usually when I see this type of comment.
You can always spot them by the first word being “No” or “False” followed by a confidently asserted yet hilariously incorrect statement.
I suggest reading this [0] and approaching these discussions with more humility in the future. As you yourself stated, you’re an SRE, not a security expert, yet this forum is full of them.
Wow! The linked article is downright terrifying. It convinced me that spying is the real purpose of forcing apps on users. How do we look in terms of regulations on this issue? I assume the EU data act covers part of that, right? What do we have for the rest of the world?
Yeah, this is the reason why Swiggy offers discounts for their phone app and not their web app. The discount is effectively paid for by your personal data.
We (software agency) recently encountered this line of argument for the first time here in Germany.
It definitely reduces costs to swap 3 platform support to 2, but it still came as a kind of surprise to me. They (customer) poured years and seven digit figures into the web-based version which is now effectively going to be trashed. The current prod metrics are not supporting the 90% mobile thesis... I guess they just have high confidence that it will become true soon.
I'm wondering if these are the first signs of an age-based bias I have and the next generation just can't really imagine a majority of users using desktop PCs.
Ther's a line between "we don't support this platform" and actively making it hostile to try and use a platform. It may have even taken extra development time to make sure they can reject showing the QR code on a webpage, if their app is just serving that same web page.
If corporate no longer wants to support mobile web, then it means I don't have budget to host it. It means developers can't put time against fixing it, QA aren't tasked to test it before releases, and support staff are not being trained in supporting it. The last one is pretty key because it's a huge metric for cost center: how many support calls is a thing generating? And if the thing is not supposed to exist anymore, then I would have to answer questions like "why is it still accessible?"
Internal job tracking metrics would have to answer why any time is going to running this thing, and god help us if there's a security breach via this endpoint we were supposed to have eliminated N time ago.
An unsupported internal API is one thing - and they're generally a huge timesink anyway. An unsupported external user interface is a cost center which I can't justify, and impacts numerous other parts of the business.
Ticketmaster and their stupid app is another good example. As if I couldn't hate Ticketmaster any more I recently bought some tickets and learned about this idiocy.
I throw the tickets into my (digital) wallet and then don't think about the app until the next time I need to buy tickets. But that's not helpful if you don't have a phone.
I used to print paper tickets so I could get into a show if my phone died / got broken / etc. That doesn't happen often, to be sure, but I also don't want phone bullshit to keep me out of a show that, in the case of this recent one, I have >$500 in tickets for. One less dependency is a good thing.
More to the point, the app isn't for my convenience. It doesn't do anything to make my experience better.
Most e-tickets designed for wallet apps follow a well understood standard which has multiple implementations available for different OSes, e.g. https://linuxphoneapps.org/services/pkpass/
I disagree. It's a tandem, and corporations and the government are increasingly welded together.
Also, I'm not too worried about the airport usecase as we're already being tracked and surveilled and inspected there as much as possible.
But it's another step to normalize and mandate phone and app use. The puzzle pieces are falling in place. Soon, AI could screen-capture your phone screen to detect suspicious activity, and track every tap you do, also taking pictures with the front-facing camera without you knowing, listening on the mic, etc. etc., connecting it all to your real identity. Because why not? If it's done step by step, nobody will care at all. Maybe that sounds pessimistic, but it looks like the end game and I see no principled political stance against it, nor any insurmountable technical hurdles.
That's an insinuation with some vague truth to it, but not much. Budget airlines are not government departments, and competition between them isn't phony.
"The sky is blue" "I feel that it is increasingly yellow"
There's little competition pressure because consumers don't care. I guess the standard theory says that the buck ends there. If people are fine with it, it's fine.
You are arguing there's little competition pressure between budget airlines, a business with notoriously razor thin margins which people shop almost exclusively on price to the exclusion of all other parameters?
We'd do well with taking an honest stock of what allowed the formation of democracies and civil liberties, because likely it wasn't that average people longed for it so much that it happened. It's out of my weight class to pitch a grand narrative for this, but we've seen many forms of societies and governances and the current one (or from 20 years ago) won't be the last.
There have been very few policies truly passed because "everyone wanted it". It always starts with some "radical" minority bringing the idea to light and then campaigning for it. Even if the thing is obvious.
The former happening would make so many things easier.
Ex - we already have plenty of cases where the government outsources payment processing to 3rd parties. What happens when that private 3rd party declares it's not accepting payments through anything except a mobile app?
Ryanair has always been an horrible corporation in the business of shipping drunk and old people for £5 with the help of public subsidies.
They also largely abused their staff to enable that business model.
They are like many other corporations creating more and more fragile systems and I bet one of those days something is gonna go wrong and nobody will board their plane for a day or two.
Wow, rendering their entire core business operation vulnerable to extortion from a DDoS attack that's capable of taking down a single API endpoint? Even if they have a major commercial WAF/CDN, the cost to take down Cloudflare is a lot lower than the revenue lost by an entire airline being unable to process boarding at all.
Fingers crossed the Russians figure this out and help remind these businesses why lacking paper alternatives is NOT a cost-saving measure. The group that can take down that API endpoint can pretty much name their price to Ryanair and the C-suite will effectively have a fiduciary duty to shareholders to pay it if there's truly zero alternative and that starts disrupting revenue indefinitely.
They are verbose and vague about it: "Some passengers may be concerned about what they can do if they lose their phone or of their devices run out of battery before the pass board the aircraft. Ryanair has said they will assist people experiencing difficulties free of charge at the gate gathering their information and flight details which will be cross-checked and validated against the flight manifest so that they can board as normal."
Of course-- there will be accommodations to start out with. Then, after the new system has become "just the way things work," the accommodations will be removed for security or efficiency or some other reason.
Or maybe not. I've never lost a boarding pass, but if you lose one, you can get it re-issued somewhere, right?
Without endorsement of the behavior, here's a guy getting arrested for being argumentative about not having a boarding pass in the app, and being told he can't pay their 5 dollar boarding pass print fee with cash.
Morally, this guy did nothing wrong. These abusive practices need to be stood up to. I'd rather live in a world where this sort of vehement NO when someone with power tries to pull something unreasonable, like demanding an app or fee, is common and effective, than this world where companies and governments can just steamroll people. Ideally, other passengers would see what's going on, see the systemic problem (even if minor in this case), and also join in in the NO. Make the terminal unusable with an angry growing mass until they decide to be reasonable. The comments on that youtube video mocking the guy and not even addressing the airline's unreasonable policy are also an absurd lack of solidarity against these companies. When someone is mad they probably have a reason to be mad and we ought to listen to them and then get mad too if we agree, other than just dismissing someone for feeling an emotion, lest we'll just have more and more rights, privileges, and respect eroded. We need a culture of standing up for each other against injustice, no matter how small.
I know that his behavior was not a rational pursuit, since in practice humans are too skittish about standing up for themselves and too skittish against anyone whom they see as abnormal/not complying with social norms. But, this does not change the fact that he's completely in the right. I'd love to know a more effective strategy to deal with this shit from companies, if anyone knows one. What should he do instead in this situation where it is simply too unjust to him to be acceptable to give in?
Also, I'm offended at this cop for telling the guy to "be cordial". NO. The airline's behavior is not cordial! They do NOT deserve it back! Freedom of speech means freedom to get mad at someone, possibly REALLY mad, when they try to be unreasonable. Being angry is different from being violent, and the government shouldn't shield people and companies from this consequence (angry people) of their actions.
>The comments on that youtube video mocking the guy and not even addressing the airline's unreasonable policy are also an absurd lack of solidarity against these companies.
I see this a lot on reddit and youtube. I tend to think that it's bots paid for by the company.
There's always just too much unanimous agreement in favor of the corporation.
Maybe I just don't want to believe that people are that homogenized.
The likely future is where you'll be given a USB-C charger to charge your phone. If you have no phone or is broken, it will be the equivalent to having a strongly damaged passport. No fly that day, get a new phone, fly on another date, just like if you needed a new passport. The phone will be your ID, passport, credit card and everything. But since it will be all backed up in Google/Apple/Microsoft cloud, maybe you'll be able to buy a new simple phone near the gate, log in via fingerprint and facial recognition and go on your merry way. But also, once all this stuff is connected up in the cloud, maybe facial and fingerprint recognition will be enough to fly. NFC chips under the skin are probably too bad optics for the near future, but in one or two generations, attitudes will shift.
> I've never lost a boarding pass, but if you lose one, you can get it re-issued somewhere, right?
Yes, typically there's a fee for getting it printed at the check-in counter.
With a normal airline? You walk up to the gate, say you lost your paperwork (boarding pass, ticket, doesn't matter), show your ID, and get a new boarding pass issued within about a minute of managing to get someone's attention. At least that was my experience. No hassle, no fee.
Ryanair? I would expect them to offer you their boarding pass printing service for only $99.99 (you missed the $49.99 special that was only available until 4 hours before boarding, silly you).
Maybe we need to collectively all 'lose' our phone just before boarding at the gate, resulting in some flight delays, so that this nonsense gets reverted.
And the sort of solidarity that unfortunately will never happen. Most people will just download the app and carry on. Very few people hold the very real concern about things moving in this direction.
Your average phone user is already hostage to 7 hours of screentime daily. They don't mind installing more apps. The average person has hundreds of apps on their phone, many of which are never even used.
And they have a constant barrage of notifications, and they tap "Allow" on everything. It can be mind boggling if you spend your life in a developer-minded bubble. They watch ads. They sometimes like the ads and smile at them and don't skip them immediately.
Nothing much has changed since the times when you had to "fix" your aunt's computer in 2003 because it's "slow" and found a zillion toolbars and cleanup/speedup utilities.
This has been the same for most low cost airlines (e.g., Frontier, Spirit). To get a boarding pass without a mobile, customer must go to the counter, pay an additional fee and get the printed version.
To me, that's getting bogged down in details. What matters is the intent and direction. Maybe you will have some workarounds for some time. But just as more and more places go cashless, it will also be paperless and mandatory app-based.
Maybe off-topic but I remember when people were worried about services becoming digital and older users no longer being able to access them without a personal computer.
Fast forward a few decades and now the old users are on desktop and we’re worried about services only being available for smartphones.
the point is to have everyone "collared" and traceable. The conspiracy guys all worry about getting micro-chipped but that's far too invasive and obvious for modern society. the new Control gives the illusion of endless opportunities and freedom while also being the very method of limiting that freedom. It is the leverage through which control is exerted.
to quote Gilles Deleuze's Postscript on Societies of Control(1992):
>The conception of a control mechanism, giving the position of any element
within an open environment at any given instant (whether animal in a reserve
or human in a corporation, as with an electronic collar), is not necessarily one
of science fiction. Felix Guattari has imagined a city where one would be able
to leave one's apartment, one's street, one's neighborhood, thanks to one's...electronic card that raises a given barrier; but the card could just as easily be rejected on a given day or between certain hours; what counts is not the barrier but the computer that tracks each person's position-licit or illicit...
It is insane to read Deleuze, Baudrillard, Debord, etc. in 2025. Just insanely prescient, and the perfect illustration that being able to describe and anticipate problems is nowhere near sufficient to solve them.
I hope the push for verification leads to the normies learning the ways of identity theft. The fun really ramps up once they figure out free money tricks.
I am pretty sure that the point is that the "normies" are going to be getting their identities stolen in order for others to pass the age verification.
Most of the times the user prioritizes more convenient options over privacy. "Pressure for competing options" will mean that options compete for the most convenient way, not most secure or most private.
Sure, but the point is that the more convenient less-secure ways are going to be criminalized. Otherwise nobody would use the age verification app in the first place.
Developers contributing to that project should be ashamed. I am sadly situated in Europe and the crap the EU pushes out recently with chat control, bad ID solutions and censorship doesn't match what democracies should expect.
Not going to use the app of course. If that restricts me I will seek to route around this censorship and share with others. This crap has to be resisted.
So this answers my question about not actually having social media. In theory you wouldn't be denied. But as a professional in the field who cares for privacy, and simply has no use for such services, i wonder if they could just assume you are lying and has bad intentions.
I noticed that same behavior across older Gemini models. I build a chatbot at work around 1.5 Flash, and one day suddenly it was behaving like that. it was perfect before, but after it always saluted the user like it was their first chat, despite me sending the history. And i didn't found any changelog regarding that at the time.
After that i moved to OpenAI, Gemini models just seem unreliable on that regard.
This might be because Gemini silently updates checkpoints (1.5 001 -> 1.5 002, 2.5 0325 -> 2.5 0506 -> 2.5 0605) while OpenAI doesn't update them without ensuring that they're uniformly better and typically emails customers when they are updated.
I agree its an amazing payment method, it worked for me for most of the time. Still, we depend on bank's stability and technical availability for it to work. Once i needed to pay for something and forgot my card at home, at that same time my bank was going trough technical issues and i couldn't pay.
Despite rare reliability issues, my fear about it is that it requires a phone. Being so popular, i fear when places will refuse any other form of payments and accept only PIX, making anybody not using a phone unable to buy their products, with the common assumption that everybody uses it ("don't you guys have phones???"). You can't install banking apps on rooted phones or alternative mobile OSs (or is very very hard), so you are trapped with Android or IOs to use it.
I hope it doesn't come to that, but it seems it's going that way.
It is. A friend of mine has this. It took her so much time to actually seek help, despite the excruciating pain, and she got part of her digestive system removed because it spread too much.
Nowadays, after 2 years of the surgery, she manages it with a restrict and healthy diet, and the pill. It takes a big toll on the well being even after the pain is gone, and she is almost always tired because of it, the body is constantly fighting the inflammation.
I have a big issue with this, and the truth is that the majority of people simply do not care and/or do not understand the implications.
By tying your service to a smartphone your are basically refusing to provide service if the costumer doesn't agree to Apple's or Google's TOS. If the app doesn't complain about emulation or something different than Android or IOS you are in luck, but that's not the case with most banking apps. And that's only talking about people who don't have it by choice and have money to buy one.
For me, once, it went beyond: I took my first dose of the Covid vaccine, and the second dose's date would still be announced. I asked where it would be available to the nurse, "On the Instagram page of the <local health body>". "But i don't have Instagram" i said, and the nurse shrugged. It requires both a phone and a social media account with your real info, but since absolute nobody complains about it they just do because it's easier.
This will continue as long people are complacent with it. In some places the government is required to provide you services, by law, by any means available and not depending on 3rd party service, but they do require apps anyway and people stay quiet. Phones as an alternative is fine, it's a tool, but should not be an obligatory device for you to be considered an human being.
Sure, I own a smartphone, it runs just plain android but without any google accounts or services because I do not agree to Googles terms of services. I never did, and as an European citizen especially with recent developments I feel that has been the right choice.
The thing is, without google account there is no play store, and without play store I am not able to install the majority of apps - no banking, no parking, and all the other services people complain about in these threads.
This is my choice, and I stick to it. I'm also pretty vocal about it and complain when needed. Doctors office informs me I only can get medicine with the app? Apparently they can make exceptions when you complain, because I'm allowed to get medicine with a simple phone call. My bank tried to force me to use their app, but apparently they still do have an alternative login method when you complain. Sure, I know it's a fight I will lose in the long run, but I enjoy it while it lasts.
> if the costumer doesn't agree to Apple's or Google's TOS.
Or if Apple or Google arbitrarily decide that they don't like that customer. You don't have to have done something wrong, they can decide that you're likely associated with someone who did.
When people ask for examples, I point to a NYT report of a man in San Francisco whose young son had redness on his penis and complained about it feeling sore. The pediatrician asked for some photos to make a diagnosis online. Google flagged it as child porn and notified the police. The police said it wasn't, but Google declined to restore service.
In India, Google locked an engineer from Gujarat out of his Google
account because it contained explicit content potentially involving
child abuse or exploitation. The engineer believes it's because the
account contain images of him as a child being bathed by his
grandmother.
I use these examples specifically because many in my government want "Chat Control", where snitchware scans messages for child porn and the like, and notifies the police. It will be full of false positives like these, especially if the scanning software continues to be built by puritanical American companies.
Another class is people who the US deems to be a security threat. How long will it be until the US extends its sanctions against the ICC by ordering Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Oracle, and Google to shut down the accounts for the ICC and anyone involved in their genocide investigation, work and personal?
https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Using_Source_Contro...
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