this post was submitted on 25 Apr 2024
5 points (61.9% liked)

Privacy

32173 readers
1470 users here now

A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.

Some Rules

Related communities

much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
 

Banks, email providers, booking sites, e-commerce, basically anything where money is involved, it's always the same experience. If you use the Android or iOS app, you stayed signed in indefinitely. If you use a web browser, you get signed out and asked to re-authenticate constantly - and often you have to do it painfully using a 2FA factor.

For either of my banks, if I use their crappy Android app all I have to do is input a short PIN to get access. But in Firefox I also get signed out after about 10 minutes without interaction and have to enter full credentials again to get back in - and, naturally, they conceal the user ID field from the login manager to be extra annoying.

For a couple of other services (also involving money) it's 2FA all the way. Literally no means of staying signed in on a desktop browser more than a single session - presumably defined as 30 minutes or whatever. Haven't tried their own crappy mobile apps but I doubt very much it is such a bad experience.

Who else is being driven crazy by this? How is there any technical justification for this discrimination? Browsers store login tokens just like blackbox spyware on Android-iOS, there is nothing to stop you staying signed in indefinitely. The standard justification seems to be that web browsers are less secure than mobile apps - is there any merit at all to this argument?

Or is all this just a blatant scam to push people to install privacy-destroying spyware apps on privacy-destroying spyware OSs, thus helping to further undermine the most privacy-respecting software platform we have: the web.

If so, could a legal challenge be mounted using the latest EU rules? Maybe it's time for Open Web Advocacy to get on the case.

Thoughts appreciated.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

on a closed-source software stack

Android is open-source. My phone runs an open-source build of it.

At this point it's barely any worse than a web browser. I know it's sandboxed, it can't access anything I don't want to. All it lacks is isolation with the kernel since web browsers run JavaScript and Android runs native code.

Worst comes to worst you just run the app in Waydroid.

[โ€“] JubilantJaguar 1 points 7 months ago