this post was submitted on 23 Jan 2025
301 points (100.0% liked)

Technology

69867 readers
3874 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related news or articles.
  3. Be excellent to each other!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
  10. Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.

Approved Bots

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
301
Apple Pressed by India to Pre-Install Government Apps on iPhones (www.macrumors.com)
submitted 3 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
76 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

The push comes as India seeks greater regulatory control over global tech companies. The initiative would require manufacturers to include the government's GOV.in app store and related apps like BHIM, DigiLocker, VoterID on smartphones sold from India.

Beyond pre-installation, they also requested that their apps be available for download outside the company's app stores from third-party sources without triggering "untrusted source" warnings.

top 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 63 points 3 months ago (3 children)

I'll be the paragraph guy today.

BHIM stands for BHarat Interface for Money, a payment application that uses India's money transfer protocol called United Payment Interface (UPI). This makes all payments cashless, from ₹1 to ₹1,00,000. No transaction fees, as of yet.

Digilocker is a government document vault app that allows digital copies of documents to be enforced. You don't need to carry around the physical copies, the QR code generated by the app is scanned by specialised scanners that validate the validity of the document and also fetches any relevant records. This includes the Driver's License, Aadhar Card (Indian National Identity Card), PAN Card (Permanent Account Number; used for what is essentially a 2 Factor Authentication system of documents for verification of identity), etc.

Voter ID app is to identify your voting region, and make any changes to the details of your Voter ID.

The Gov.in store is new to me and I don't think I need one more store on my device, but hey... I don't use an iPhone 😄.

Why is all of this not a single app? Idk.

Coming back to the point, I don't mind having important apps like these pre-installed. It helps to have these for people who aren't as technically inclined as you'd hope.

[–] [email protected] 61 points 3 months ago (3 children)

Why is all of this not a single app?

Because they have very different functions though all associated with the government. It's just better to separate apps with different functions.

Thanks for the explanation.

load more comments (3 replies)
[–] [email protected] 34 points 3 months ago (4 children)

These are all open-source and don't track location, right?

[–] [email protected] 25 points 3 months ago

I mean they are known to be invasive, even trying to ban VPNs so don't be too surprised lol

[–] [email protected] 17 points 3 months ago

Right...?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago

Lmao. No. UPI is an open standard I think... Open as in you can apply to use it. It is run via the Reserve Bank of India to ensure safety and validity.

But no. None of these are open source. Location tracking is, I think, not across them all...

UPI apps use it because it's easier to pinpoint where a payment was made, thus ensuring you can verify the payment receiver. That's all I understand about it atm.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 months ago (5 children)

BHIM stands for BHarat Interface for Money, a payment application that uses India's money transfer protocol called United Payment Interface (UPI). This makes all payments cashless, from ₹1 to ₹1,00,000. No transaction fees, as of yet

In addition to BHIM, there are lot of third party apps for UPI.

load more comments (5 replies)
[–] [email protected] 37 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Wild how many people preach from their high horse every time a non-western country does this, as if there aren’t western backdoors built into all of these.

I’m against all government backdoors and spying efforts, but let’s not pretend they’re attempting anything the west has not already successfully done. There’s definitely an air of racism to the double standard.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 3 months ago (1 children)

What backdoors are pre installed on western phones? I'm talking actual backdoors on the device itself. I feel researches would have already found and altered to some very publicly.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 30 points 3 months ago (1 children)

These are neither confirmed, nor have ever been proven, and don't deal with phones.

The first link is about networking hardware, which has already been found by security researchers long ago.

The second is about an attempt at doing something like a backdoor that never came to fruition.

The last link has never been observed or proven, and how it would work is impossible to know. Having a "backdoor" on a CPU is meaningless without the other attached hardware to work with. Some would say impossible, and made up.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago (2 children)

So you don’t believe anything that’s been leaked by whistleblowers? You think the Snowden stuff is all fake?

[–] [email protected] 18 points 3 months ago (2 children)

Depending a lie with whataboutism is a bad look.

Why not just admit you don't know, but enjoy being paranoid and conspiratorial in this space?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago

Once: apparently the number of times someone has said “I enjoy being paranoid“

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago

What lie? What “whataboutism”? The person tried to deny there’s any surveillance built into western technologies, and I gave a prominent example to prove them wrong. That’s not what “whataboutism” means.

Weird move for y’all to burn your astroturf accounts gaslighting people about what we’ve all personally witnessed from whistleblowers. You really expect that to work?

[–] [email protected] 12 points 3 months ago (1 children)

The NSA activities Snowden leaked were specifically happening in data and telecom centers to snoop traffic in transit. He make known some secret programs about exploiting and compromising devices, but of that's already known as a possibility. He never detailed anything about backdoors on phones from manufacturers as you've suggested.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Right, the Snowden leaks did not include phone backdoors. Just everything else you denied.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 months ago (10 children)

Lol I'm not denying anything but your misguided comment. It's not accurate.

load more comments (10 replies)
[–] [email protected] 29 points 3 months ago

This is so annoying, I don't want bloatware on my new iPhone.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

What are the nature of the apps? If it's just things like digital IDs and government services, that's not bad since it helps tech illiterate people accessing them. Big room for fash fuckery though.

And as always, preinstalled apps should be deletable.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 3 months ago (2 children)

No. If you allow one country to shirk the norm, other countries will also start pushing

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Russia already has a norm to show “Russian apps” the first time activating an iPhone or iPad, so that ship has sailed

[–] [email protected] 10 points 3 months ago (1 children)

The ship hasn't sailed; the more countries you let do that, the more problematic the precedent becomes. This isn't a binary thing.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I don't think the slippery slope argument works here, you can object to any rules and regulations by saying other countries would start pushing bad rules and regulations if you comply. It's not all or nothing.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I don’t think of it as slippery slope, I think of it as setting precedent

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 10 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (4 children)

I don't see it necessarely as a bad thing. I would rather have my gov id app (for taxes, id and driving licence, public services info) on my phone when i buy it, rather than candy crush and other fucking bloatware. I think it would also help a lot of non-tech savy users set up their phones quickly.

Second of all, gov ID apps having their own store on the side is good. Them being only available on google's store makes it so that if you want to access public services from your state you have to go through google (?), it is clearly not acceptable by a government standpoint, It is even worse than a monopoly.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 3 months ago

I would rather have my gov id app

I'd rather have none of that. Give me basic system apps and an app store, and I'll handle the rest.

If an org wants stuff pre-installed, there should be an option for rolling out a batch of app installs when issuing a new device (probably exists?). Outside of that, leave the base install as bare as possible, and give me an option to import everything from my old device (exists).

load more comments (3 replies)
[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago

I really don’t mind the concept of preinstalled applications as long as they can be easily removed.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago (3 children)

See what you started EU

[–] [email protected] 24 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (11 children)

The EU does not mandate that Apple preinstall government apps. Stop lying.

The EU went the other way and mandated that more apps should be uninstallable.

load more comments (11 replies)
[–] [email protected] 20 points 3 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 26 points 3 months ago

lol yeah the EU mandates that users can delete more core pre-installed apps. It’s literally the opposite

Apple will let users delete core apps, including the App Store, Messages, Photos, Camera, and Safari, for the first time.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Fucking propaganda. It seriously enrages me how people like you have become so programmed that they'll attribute everything to an organization you've been told to hate. Don't you ever stop and see how you're being used?

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago

Good morning sirs

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago (3 children)

I think Apple would pull out of India before they'd cave to this.

[–] [email protected] 36 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Apple will do whatever is profitable. Corporations don’t have ethics.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 22 points 3 months ago

They're pretty happy to comply with censorship in China though.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (3 children)

I don't know why you'd think that? Apple is a publicly traded company that ultimately cares about profit and nothing else.

They already comply with a bunch of stuff in China and other places, why would India be any different?

load more comments (3 replies)
load more comments
view more: next ›