No. This assumption is the core fault with the entire line of reasoning. The typical sheep will not do arbitrary things for a stranger such as sending you his entire bank account because you told him he needed to pay an IRS penalty in crypto to avoid being picked up by the state police who are already en route in 15 minutes.
It's a continuum. The question is how much of the low end needs to be protected by the system.
Binning into discreet blocks to match your example, the question is where to place the dividers between the three categories - nerd, sheep, and incompetent. We don't care to accommodate the third.
In theory I have no problem with the idea of hanging the incompetents out to dry, when I imagine them as unsympathetic idiots, the same people who litter, and can’t drive correctly. But actually I think most of us would be horrified when it turns out that category of incompetents includes our parents and grandparents, or, increasingly, our children (Gen Z has been increasingly falling victim to scams, partly because they have no idea how computers work since modern ones present only highly abstract surfaces to them, and I suspect Alpha will be the same).
The entire point here is that sheep do not need an overly protective mode. It's a false premise.
I know plenty of them. I help them navigate modern tech. I install fdroid on their phones. They lie on a continuum and none of them are going to turn on developer mode (or whatever BigTech wants to call it) because a stranger on the phone told them to.
There is a small sliver on the far end of the continuum that will do things like that. But in general they are sufficiently gullible that no measure that can be bypassed will ever work for them. They require a Fisher-Price device.
BigTech wants to hold that small sliver up as justification for their anticompetitive practices.
You (or another commenter) are right though that blocking sideloading eliminates but one avenue for this abuse, which at first makes us feel good that we then shouldn't have to give this freedom up! Now, the bad news is that from Big Tech's pov, the open Web is the next enemy in the crosshairs. The future "Sheep mode" may simply be App Store (only sanctioned scams, paying their 30% cut, are allowed there!) + a "Web Browser" without an address bar, which can open any of the "Thousands of Safe Sites" on the OS Vendor's allow-list. Getting on the list is of course "easy," and just requires a $999/year subscription, and proving SOC2, GDPR, and CCPA compliance.
This isn't actually that obvious, for a number of reasons.
The first is that it causes there to be more sheep. If you add friction to running your own software then fewer people start learning about it to begin with. Cynical cliches about the government wanting a stupid population aside, as a matter of policy that's bad. You don't want a default that erodes the inherent defenses of people to being victimized and forces them to rely on a corporate bureaucracy that doesn't always work. And it's not just bad because it makes people easier to scam. You don't want to be eroding your industrial base of nerds. They tend to be pretty important if you ever want anything new to be invented, or have to fight a war, or even just want to continue building bridges that don't fall down and planes that don't fall out of the sky.
Another major one is that it's massively anti-competitive. If the incumbents get a veto, guess what they're going to veto. This is, of course, the thing the incumbents are using the scams as an excuse to do on purpose. But destroying competition is also bad, even for sheep. Nobody benefits from an oligopoly except the incumbents.
And it's not just competition between platforms. Think about how "scratch that itch" apps get created: Some nerd writes the app and it has only one feature and is full of bugs, but they post it on the internet for other people to try. If trying it is easy, other people do, and then they get bug reports, other people contribute code, etc. Eventually it gets good enough that everyone, including the sheep, will want to use it, and by that point it might even be in the big app store. But if trying it is hard when it's still a pile of bugs and the original author isn't sure anybody else even wants to use it, then nobody else tries it and it never gets developed to the point that ordinary people can use it.
So maybe the scam we should most be worried about here is the one where scams are used as an excuse to justify making it hard for people to try new apps and competing app stores, and deal with the other scams in a different way. Like putting the people who commit fraud in prison.
Maybe 10-20%, generously. The people who are falling for it under current protections clearly are not reading anything they're looking at or thinking about security at all, they've fallen for social engineering scams and sincerely believe they're at imminent risk of being arrested by the FBI or that their adult child is about to be killed. They're in fight or flight mode already, not critical thinking and careful deliberation mode.
If you were to rank everyone by gullibility, these people would largely be clustered in the top 1-2% of most gullible people. There is very little you can do to protect these people, realistically.
What I would challenge you to consider is this: where do we draw the "good enough" line, where we finally stop sacrificing freedom over the devices we purchased under terms that originally included freedom, control, and ownership at the altar of protecting the vulnerable?
Do scam victims need to be 0.1% of all Android users? 0.01%? 0.0001%? Should this extend to computers too - should local admin become completely unavailable to all Windows users? Should root become unavailable to all Mac users? To all Linux users? Should you be allowed to own technology at all, or merely rent it as a managed service, to protect those who cannot be trusted to own devices without getting scammed?
> What I would challenge you to consider is this: where do we draw the "good enough" line, where we finally stop sacrificing freedom over the devices we purchased under terms that originally included freedom, control, and ownership at the altar of protecting the vulnerable?
There's nothing to challenge here. The method I proposed keeps you fully in control and owning your device. Anybody can follow that process if they want. It's not like I said each person has to get approval from Google before enabling developer mode on their phone.
> Do scam victims need to be 0.1% of all Android users? 0.01%? 0.0001%?
This is not some kind of paradox like you're making it out to be. A very reasonable starting point would be "get this scam rate down to match {that of another less-common scam}". Iterate until/unless new data comes along suggesting otherwise.
> Should this extend to computers too - should local admin become completely unavailable to all Windows users? Should root become unavailable to all Mac users? To all Linux users?
"Too"?! Where did I ever suggest root should be "completely unavailable" to all Android users?
> Should you be allowed to own technology at all, or merely rent it as a managed service, to protect those who cannot be trusted to own devices without getting scammed?
Where did I suggest any of this?
When you say "Iterate until/unless new data comes along suggesting otherwise", does that mean you will want to continue adding more friction and more restrictions as long as a number or percentage of people (that exceeds some threshold) continue to get scammed?
What I am asking you to do, as a thought exercise, is to define that threshold, and then to consider that if we never meet that threshold, how far are you willing to go with iterating and adding more friction, stripping user control in pursuit of it?
It seems to me that you have a mental model where some small, reasonable changes will dramatically reduce the number of scam victims to near zero. All I'm asking you to do is sincerely consider what your preferred course of action looks like if you are wrong about how effective each additional layer of controls are.
All it means is "keep reevaluating the situation and your approach based on the data." I can't possibly claim to have all the answers for every hypothetical available right here.
> It seems to me that you have a mental model where some small, reasonable changes will dramatically reduce the number of scam victims to near zero.
Replace "will...near zero" with "has a reasonable chance of...low enough that the fish becomes too small to fry" and you might be capturing my thoughts better.
> All I'm asking you to do is sincerely consider what your preferred course of action looks like if you are wrong about how effective each additional layer of controls are.
I am not a prophet (or a dictator). I'm an engineer. I see a potential solution or mitigation, I evaluate the trade-offs, and if it seems worthwhile, I suggest/try it. If it works out well, great. If not, I reevaluate everything based on the facts at that point. "I don't have any good idea anymore" is certainly a possibility I could reach, as is "I have another idea"...
Clearly there are a million factors to consider in each situation. Some predictable, some not. Just to list a few obvious ones off the top of my head: how fast we get there, how users react, how governments and lawmakers react, the magnitude of the scamming (not just rate! but also monetary amount), what other threats pop up in the meantime, what threats go away, what other mitigations or alternatives are available to try next, what the financial system even looks like at that point... these are all relevant. I can't predict what we should do in a vague, underspecified hypothetical where the only concrete premise seems to be that my predictions are wrong. (!) What I can see and suggest some solution for is the reality right now.
That actually sounds like an argument is favor of this restriction. If someone is in a position of deep trust with the scammer then waiting a day is nothing. But if they're in a panic, not thinking things through or calling anyone for advice, that state probably won't last 24 hours.
The problem with this line of reasoning is that it proves too much, which really gets to the heart of the issue.
If people are willing to be led to the slaughterhouse in a blindfold then it's not just installing third party code which is a problem. You can't allow them to use the official bank app on an approved device to transfer money because a scammer could convince them to do it (and then string them along until the dispute window is closed). You can't allow them to read their own email or SMS or they'll give the scammer the code. If the user is willing to follow malicious instructions then the attacker doesn't need the device to be running malicious code. Those users can't be saved by the thing that purportedly exists only to save them.
Whereas if you can expect them to think for two seconds before doing something, what's wrong with letting them make their own choices about what to install?