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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • Another banking app thread, fun! Don’t use phones for banking. One just trades privacy for perceived convenience. For “safety” you give your bank:

    • Unnecessary lower-level system access than normal apps, for SAFETY!
    • Your location as often as they can harvest it
    • What apps you have installed
    • Any metadata they can exfiltrate through trackers in the app that can be mated with metadata from other app trackers
    • Any personal information they can gather from your phone

    Furthermore, if you use tap-to-pay, which some banks require their app be installed to use, you’re then giving every transaction you do, with or without tap-to-pay, to the operating system provider and any third parties along the way. Use your credit card at a store and the phone’s at home? That transaction still gets scooped up.

    Finally, you have this object you always carry with you, that has access to all your financial information, that a bad guy just has to punch you in the face to get you to log into your bank and delete all your money. Bravo! With a card, it can be shut off afterwards, and the bank can mark any transactions happening afterwards as fraudulent. With a phone app, they can Zelle themselves your money and the forward it to some cryptocurrency and good luck. Then clean out your RobinHood, your DraftKings, your CoinBase, your 401k, and anything else they find along the way.

    Use the bank webapp if one is desperate.

    Banking. On. Phones. Is. Stupid.










  • And using tap or chip on a regular credit card does as well. Every tap rotates through a set of keys in the card. The periodic use of the chip refreshes the tap keys. It isn’t the first gen tap to pay on credit cards anymore, it is much more robust.

    But beyond that, the retailer already saw your face when you walked in, already saw it at the point of sale, already tracked you as you traveled the store via WiFi, already saw the BT/WiFi profile of your rotating MAC address device as it only obfuscates, and in some cases, already had your phone join their WiFi network via EAP-SIM through your carrier, already scanned your license plate with Flock in the parking lot, and already saw your club/discount/points card number at the point of sale, so they already associated you with yourself.

    Tap-to-pay also sets up so all your transactions, on-phone or not, are captured by the handset manufacturer for further resale of metadata.




  • skuzz@discuss.tchncs.detoAndroid@lemmy.worldLiving with GrapheneOS: FAQ
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    6 days ago

    Who cares? What is the obsession with banking apps? From a privacy perspective, one does not want tap to pay or banking apps on their device. Setting that up gives the bank/a whole pipeline of interim companies access to every transaction you make as well as phone telemetry, whether or not you use the tap to pay service. Carrying a card or paper money is so simple.

    It’s a novelty, sure, but who wants tying their ability to purchase, drive, go through airports, and such, to an electronic stalking tether with a limited battery? Much simpler, as others have said, to use tools that do not require battery.


  • And yet still not as serviceable/durable as older ThinkPads. They don’t even have water spouts in the keyboard/chassis like the older ones. One could dump a beverage on the keyboard on the older models and it would route through the keyboard->chassis->even the docks had water routing ports so it would just keep traveling mostly harmless through to underneath.

    Nor batteries externally removable like used to be.

    Not a bad step though by any means, and great to see this return to user-serviceability.

    Props though, on the removable RAM. Given the need for shorter circuit paths for higher performance RAM these days, that looks a bit of clever engineering.


  • Favorite little snippet from another take:

    In 2019, the provincial government canvassed British Columbians through an online consultation and found that 93 per cent supported ending the time changes that have been in place since 1918. Much of Canada still follows the routine that largely synchronizes with the United States, so the B.C. government decided after the 2019 poll to wait until key trading partners California, Oregon and Washington State agreed to change as well.

    This week, Mr. Eby said the provincial government is not prepared to wait any longer and that B.C. will be on Pacific time permanently as of November.

    “We are done waiting. British Columbia is going to change our clocks,” Mr. Eby told reporters, adding that he hopes the decision will help nudge U.S. Congress to move forward on adopting a similar change.

    Do not wait up for us. Gonna take some time to figure out our problems.

    Additionally: Argentina, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Brazil, Cook Islands, Falkland Islands, Fiji, Georgia, Hong Kong, Iceland, Iran, Iraq, Jamaica, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Macau, Mongolia, Namibia, Paraguay, Russia, Samoa, Sudan, Syria, Turkey, Uruguay, Vanuatu, and most of Mexico have all abolished time changes, and Ukraine in 2024 switched to standard time.