4 ms·

If they put half as much effort into eliminating real scams as they do in eliminating proven useful software, what a different platform it would be.

munificent 5y ago
There is a sort of numeric tragedy of perception that happens with app stores and other environments where a curator is filtering fraud but also sometimes nuking some good apps in the process. As users, we only have any visibility into three numbers: A. The number of good apps that make it through the filter. (True positives.) B. The number of good apps that are caught by it. (False positives.) C. The number of fraudulent apps that make it through the filter. (False negatives.) B may be larger than C, leading to the perception that the filter does more harm than ngood. But we are getting caught in a base rate fallacy. To really understand the filter, we need one more number: D. The number of fraudulent apps caught by the filter. (True negatives.) My impression is that average people have no idea what a huge sea of garbage, fraud, and bad actors is swirling out there on the Internet. The number of bad people is relatively small, but the volume of malicious hot garbage they are able to spew out is incredibly large. I wouldn't be surprised if every false positive (a good app like the one here getting caught) was balanced by a thousand true negatives (bad apps being filtered out). With rates like that, the filter is clearly vital. But we don't see the full picture, so we never really know. One piece of anecdata we do have is what unfiltered ecosystems look like. And they seem to universally descend into roiling cesspits of porn, hate speech, warez, etc. So while it's very important to continue being critical of gatekeepers because they wield disproportionate social power, it's also good to be mindful that they aren't all bad. Notice how these days hacking always seems to be about phishing or email attachments? Everyone seems to have forgotten the days when worms in executables downloaded from the web were a major attack vector. That dwindled because the major OSes put these filters in place. As usual, when something is working like it's supposed to, people incorrectly think it's doing nothing at all.
- makecheck 5y ago
  This isn’t really a filtering issue though; this decision was arbitrary. It is an App Store New Rule of the Week issue. Stores and platforms can and should keep all their sophisticated fraud-detection tools, hardened runtime environment, etc. and continue to guard against untold numbers of awful apps. The human review is supposed to take over where the mechanics fail. Yet we know (from Epic trial, etc.) that Apple has a comically small number of people assigned to this, relative to the millions of apps in existence. We can extrapolate how little time must be spent on each human review. We also know that people outside of Apple were able to dig up scams pretty easily, without even having access to all the tools/data that Apple must have. Apple clearly could have invested more in this, and did not. So we know (1) the Apple review team is limited, (2) serious problems can still be found with relatively little effort, and (3) they nonetheless choose to spend their limited resources chasing minor violations of App Store Rule of the Week. We also know from the Epic trial that, despite what they say, Apple certainly will give some developers special treatment. This means leniency or rule-bending was an option for them here, and who better to work with than a developer like this, who has spent years writing software for Apple platforms, clearly increasing the value of Apple devices in the process? Apple looked at that years-long relationship and said: “get out of our store”.
- vorpalhex 5y ago
  And these new security protections are obviously why users never get viruses anymore! I spent a lot of time cleaning computers for friends and family, and often times they would have viruses because users were looking at porn or downloading games. Well, it turns out most users like looking at porn and downloading games. Most users want to play indie games (that may be garbage) or read not-licensed foreign comics. Users enjoy being able to boot up old programs and play with fan made mods. Let's not pretend cracking down on all of this is for the user. Honest computer security would give the user a clear and readable label ("hey, this free game is going to send off your personal data including browser history") and let them make the choice. Users are not farm animals to be kept in neat little pens.
LocalH 5y ago
They could start by banning the scammy apps that claim in ads that you can win “real money”, and in the fine print “no rewards are provided for ad play or game completion”

munificent 5y ago

There is a sort of numeric tragedy of perception that happens with app stores and other environments where a curator is filtering fraud but also sometimes nuking some good apps in the process. As users, we only have any visibility into three numbers: A. The number of good apps that make it through the filter. (True positives.) B. The number of good apps that are caught by it. (False positives.) C. The number of fraudulent apps that make it through the filter. (False negatives.) B may be larger than C, leading to the perception that the filter does more harm than ngood. But we are getting caught in a base rate fallacy. To really understand the filter, we need one more number: D. The number of fraudulent apps caught by the filter. (True negatives.) My impression is that average people have no idea what a huge sea of garbage, fraud, and bad actors is swirling out there on the Internet. The number of bad people is relatively small, but the volume of malicious hot garbage they are able to spew out is incredibly large. I wouldn't be surprised if every false positive (a good app like the one here getting caught) was balanced by a thousand true negatives (bad apps being filtered out). With rates like that, the filter is clearly vital. But we don't see the full picture, so we never really know. One piece of anecdata we do have is what unfiltered ecosystems look like. And they seem to universally descend into roiling cesspits of porn, hate speech, warez, etc. So while it's very important to continue being critical of gatekeepers because they wield disproportionate social power, it's also good to be mindful that they aren't all bad. Notice how these days hacking always seems to be about phishing or email attachments? Everyone seems to have forgotten the days when worms in executables downloaded from the web were a major attack vector. That dwindled because the major OSes put these filters in place. As usual, when something is working like it's supposed to, people incorrectly think it's doing nothing at all.

makecheck 5y ago
This isn’t really a filtering issue though; this decision was arbitrary. It is an App Store New Rule of the Week issue. Stores and platforms can and should keep all their sophisticated fraud-detection tools, hardened runtime environment, etc. and continue to guard against untold numbers of awful apps. The human review is supposed to take over where the mechanics fail. Yet we know (from Epic trial, etc.) that Apple has a comically small number of people assigned to this, relative to the millions of apps in existence. We can extrapolate how little time must be spent on each human review. We also know that people outside of Apple were able to dig up scams pretty easily, without even having access to all the tools/data that Apple must have. Apple clearly could have invested more in this, and did not. So we know (1) the Apple review team is limited, (2) serious problems can still be found with relatively little effort, and (3) they nonetheless choose to spend their limited resources chasing minor violations of App Store Rule of the Week. We also know from the Epic trial that, despite what they say, Apple certainly will give some developers special treatment. This means leniency or rule-bending was an option for them here, and who better to work with than a developer like this, who has spent years writing software for Apple platforms, clearly increasing the value of Apple devices in the process? Apple looked at that years-long relationship and said: “get out of our store”.
vorpalhex 5y ago
And these new security protections are obviously why users never get viruses anymore! I spent a lot of time cleaning computers for friends and family, and often times they would have viruses because users were looking at porn or downloading games. Well, it turns out most users like looking at porn and downloading games. Most users want to play indie games (that may be garbage) or read not-licensed foreign comics. Users enjoy being able to boot up old programs and play with fan made mods. Let's not pretend cracking down on all of this is for the user. Honest computer security would give the user a clear and readable label ("hey, this free game is going to send off your personal data including browser history") and let them make the choice. Users are not farm animals to be kept in neat little pens.

LocalH 5y ago

They could start by banning the scammy apps that claim in ads that you can win “real money”, and in the fine print “no rewards are provided for ad play or game completion”