Mexican Loan Apps, Extortion, and the Google Play Store

Re:Mexican Loan Apps, Extortion, and the Google Play Store by xtracto on Sunday August 14, 2022 @04:04PM (#32462445)

Tangentially related to part of the text in the article : A lot of these and other apps ask you to share documents, camera, mic, gps, and other access from your phone . The problem is that several of those wont work if you reject that access. Even worse, Mexican government passed a law that made it compulsory to monitor your GPS position for Banks and other money related companies, so doing relatively common bank transactions require you to lose your privacy.

Given these blatant privacy violations, I wish mobiles had the option to "mock" data for those sensors. Share files? Sure, give access to a jail like bkank file system. Share mic? Sure, give access to a white noise generated stream, same with video/camera. Share gps? Give some mock location, etc.

That's what a privacy enabled device would do.

I wonder why hasn't this even been implemented at the browser level.

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Re:Mexican Loan Apps, Extortion, and the Google Play Store by bornfreddy on Sunday August 14, 2022 @04:18PM (#32462549)

Afaik this is what MicroG does, though their aim is different. They mimic Google services responses so that the apps work without G proprietary libraries and services but I don't think privacy is their stated goal (I'd love for someone to correct me if I'm wrong, not using MicroG myself).

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Re:Mexican Loan Apps, Extortion, and the Google Play Store by _HMCB_ on Sunday August 14, 2022 @04:46PM (#32462792)

GPS position sharing is a little frightening isn’t it? I mean, if some of these apps are cartel or organized crime related, this could become a real physical threat.

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Re:Mexican Loan Apps, Extortion, and the Google Play Store by xtracto on Sunday August 14, 2022 @09:00PM (#32464695)

It is very frightening... and you would read how it is in good hands of the banks and whatnot. Meanwhile, last week news was the leak a whole 1.2GB CSv file with account info including phone, address , balance act number from a large Mexican bank. And another one of bbva ... banks dont ha6any control.

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Re:Mexican Loan Apps, Extortion, and the Google Play Store by pongo1231 on Sunday August 14, 2022 @11:07PM (#32465428)

XPrivacyLua has the ability to feed fake data to apps.

https://github.com/M66B/XPrivacyLua

Requires rooted Android + Xposed though.

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Re:Mexican Loan Apps, Extortion, and the Google Play Store by deqwer on Monday August 15, 2022 @01:15AM (#32466114)

its likely these apps would have some security check which prevents them from running in a root environment ( at least mine did )

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Re:Mexican Loan Apps, Extortion, and the Google Play Store by pzduniak on Monday August 15, 2022 @03:13AM (#32466743)

You can also mock these checks, I used to do thar with my bank app.

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Re:Mexican Loan Apps, Extortion, and the Google Play Store by matheusmoreira on Sunday August 14, 2022 @07:20PM (#32464112)

> I wish mobiles had the option to "mock" data for those sensors

They do. The apps ask the operating system for this data through standard APIs, we just need to override those calls in order to lie to the app.

We need to own our phones instead of allowing Google and Apple to maintain control. Rooted Android can do this but Google is bringing their attestation bullshit to their APIs and soon every app will require it because they have no reason not to.

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Re:Mexican Loan Apps, Extortion, and the Google Play Store by josephcsible on Sunday August 14, 2022 @07:11PM (#32464030)

> The problem is that several of those wont work if you reject that access.

For all of the crazy rules Google has for the Play Store, I don't know why they don't have one against this.

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Re:Mexican Loan Apps, Extortion, and the Google Play Store by biggerChris on Sunday August 14, 2022 @07:34PM (#32464192)

Do you have an iPhone and if it’s jailbroken; if Yes. Do you want to implement some of these ideas into Apple lockdown mode Api? Let me know if it’s something you are interested in?

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Re:Mexican Loan Apps, Extortion, and the Google Play Store by User23 on Sunday August 14, 2022 @05:13PM (#32462980)

Isn't this standard for educational software too now? My understanding is you can't take a test remotely unless it's on a rooted system.

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Re:Mexican Loan Apps, Extortion, and the Google Play Store by leaflets2 on Sunday August 14, 2022 @05:55PM (#32463348)

I wonder if then the politicians would make it illegal to fake one's GPS location or just have the ability to fake it

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Re:Mexican Loan Apps, Extortion, and the Google Play Store by airtonix on Sunday August 14, 2022 @06:35PM (#32463726)

yeah, just launch a android virtual machine.

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Re:Mexican Loan Apps, Extortion, and the Google Play Store by metadat on Sunday August 14, 2022 @06:50PM (#32463840)

Won't work for any bank apps which require a passing check through the phone cryptographic integrity chip.

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