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.
Let's not be unduly pessimistic. Some basic rules continue to apply. By its nature, open-source software is always going to be a pretty solid guarantee against mass surveillance. If a lot of users are affected, the backdoor is going to be discovered and closed pretty quickly. That leaves the problem of individualized surveillance, where exploits are used against high-value targets. But these are by definition expensive. This fact constitutes a kind of protection for everybody else. That's the way I see it.