Re:I was blackmailed – any YouTuber could be next
by paulmd on Tuesday May 26, 2020 @09:39PM
(#23318536)
> Consider what it would cost to manually vet all apps on Play against even the most uncontroversial malware and data abuse policy
I believe this is precisely what Apple does, is it not? So perhaps not as impossible as you're casting it to be.
Re:I was blackmailed – any YouTuber could be next
by UncleMeat on Tuesday May 26, 2020 @09:51PM
(#23318594)
It isn't. You can't possibly manually review every new version of every app in detail.
Re:I was blackmailed – any YouTuber could be next
by Dylan16807 on Tuesday May 26, 2020 @10:22PM
(#23318761)
You can do it for every app with a hundred thousand installs, though. And they could manually review support tickets from youtube partner channels of similar size.
They can't vet everything, but the bare minimum of what they should be vetting is a lot closer to apple levels than their current levels.
How many people? Youtube is probably the biggest nexus of complaints, but apps on Play and the Chrome Extension store are also up there.
Consider what it would cost to manually vet all apps on Play against even the most uncontroversial malware and data abuse policy. Malicious authors are clever and apps are big. It'd take a trained reverse engineer days to truly vet a single app. How many millions of apps are on the app store? How many different versions of those apps are there? You are looking at an army of people being paid six figures to figure out if apps are doing nasty things.
Now consider how pissed people get that things like domestic abuse apps (often hiding as child monitoring apps) exist on the app store. Or plenty of other objectionable crap. If you want to tackle any of this (you don't but lots of people do) then now you've got a whole set of complex contextual problems for enforcement.
It would take a lot more than "very little" to review content.