Google's recent move to block de-Googled Android phones from reCAPTCHA is the first thing that's making me actually reconsider my LineageOS setup. Up to now the most annoying thing has been baseball/basketball games where they insist you *must* install the app, but then you can just show up and say "the app doesn't work on my phone" and they'll shunt you off to a separate line where you end up with a ticket on a website. (If it worked on a website, why in the hell did I have to install an app??)
Post
Replies:
4
Other examples are parking payment apps, ridesharing apps, ticketing apps, etc. But I've just relied on either 1) the company having some neglected mobile webapp (like Uber does) or 2) the company assuming there is some percentage of boomers with old/broken phones where the app won't run. Maybe those days are ending, and we're tending toward a China-like future where you have to run some all-encompassing all-surveilling super-app, but I was really hoping it wouldn't happen so soon.
@nolan at this point it’s just damned if you do or don’t from all angles. I gave up on deGoogled Android a year ago and went iOS, which sucks in distinct and different ways. When iOS becomes untenable, I find myself asking, “then what?”. We’ve made a society that’s impossible to exist in if you simply opt out of smartphones completely, and I’m not actually sure I want to truly opt out. I just want to own my device and data. Why is that so damn impossible if you want to exist as a person?!
@klardotsh It's sad, and I'm not far from where you are. I wish there was some privacy/freedom-respecting mobile phone option, but the longer there isn't one, the easier it is for the ecosystem to congeal around the non-free ones and make it impossible to opt out. Once web sites start forcing you to verify your age/identify, it's just game over.
@klardotsh The other problem is that I get the feeling that only millennials/GenX really care about this, because boomers don't get it, and zoomers/GenA never lived in a world without constant digital surveillance. So trying to argue about abstract values like "the open web" and "digital sovereignty" just falls on deaf ears because people literally can't imagine that the world could be any other way. Maybe we only have ourselves to blame for not building the world we wanted.
