Thread

1. autoexec · 1790188120 · focus · HN ↗

   > Defence Secretary Wes Streeting said daily lives depend on satellites that power everyday technologies like mobile phones and banking apps, adding the loss of GPS would cost the UK economy £1.4bn a day.

   Oh no! Not our precious banking apps! What a weird thing to call out specifically. It's also kind of strange to talk at such length about how critical satellites have become to people's lives, national economy, emergency services, and people's "daily freedoms", only to conclude with "So now we're using ground-based systems to take out the satellites other countries depend on for all of those things"

   1. jameshart · 1790188448 · focus · HN ↗

      In a largely cashless society like the UK, ‘banking apps’ are effectively people’s wallets. Knowing you got paid, being able to pay your rent, being able to pay for goods and services… seem like pretty everyday concerns.

      1. b112 · 1790191557 · focus · HN ↗

         If you're bored, have Claude pull apart your APK and do a privacy report.

         Your banking app is almost certainly using a company like (horrible and evil) Yodlee, which is given data by your banking app under the guise of "organizing your transactions into categories". Yodlee then quickly de-anonymizes it, by the identifiers which are identical and given to firebase, and various other orgs. Yodlee has been caught doing this before, and they still operate.

         Lots of other companies do this, so if your banking app has any callbacks to anywhere but the bank itself, it's nothing but trouble.

         After deanoymoization, such data is of course sold to everyone, including intelligence agencies, domestic and foreign.

         1. jameshart · 1790191790 · focus · HN ↗

            What does this have to do with the claim at hand which is ‘we need to keep our comms infrastructure secure because critical things like the primary way our population conducts economic transactions depend upon it’?

            That you find the population’s choice to use such mechanisms questionable, or that you think it is foolhardy to do so, does nothing to disobligate the government from trying to keep that infrastructure up and running.

            1. staplers · 1790192602 · focus · HN ↗

               I think they are pointing out it's an oxymoron. There's nothing to secure if the service itself is insecure and leaking..

               1. TallGuyShort · 1790193035 · focus · HN ↗

                  It's classic what-aboutism though. Availability is part of security and that's what seems to be considered here. It's also the more immediate concern. Yes, the software supply chain and where your data goes has high potential for compromise. But I'm not actually seeing rampant fraud in my accounts or data leaks from my bank very often.

                  1. b112 · 1790193868 · focus · HN ↗

                     High potential for compromise? No, the point is that every single transaction you make is being sold on the open market, that's the problem. Using cash prevents this. Using debit cards, credit cards, banking apps ensures this.

                     The banks provide the data anonymized, but then provide means to de-anonymize it.

                     1. TallGuyShort · 1790194497 · focus · HN ↗

                        You are discussing concerns that are completely orthogonal to the thread. The availability of digital banking was the concern. Not end to end privacy.

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