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by acdha 879 days ago
Have you ever done any Windows support? I have, and there are very, very few people you can trust not to install dodgy software if they have the ability to do so. No matter what level of warning dialog you put up, there’s some guy at a call center in India making good money walking your grandfather through the process of installing their root kit so he can help them fix their online banking.

Again, I’m not saying this isn’t a trade off with real consequences but if you want to contribute to the conversation, at least acknowledge the millions of people who’ve suffered severe embarrassment, lost money or even their lives because they trusted the wrong person’s software. This is bigger than your emotional relationship with Apple.
1 comments
cubefox 879 days ago
As far as I know those Indian call centers usually use software like AnyDesk. This is not malware. In fact, it is already available in the App Store:

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/anydesk-remote-desktop/id11761...

So I don't see how this could be a big problem.

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acdha 878 days ago
That’s the viewer, and it has limits on what they can do and how they can describe it to users. On the desktop side, we have a long history of things surreptitiously installing other things or misrepresenting the source or capabilities of the software.

Here’s an old example: one of the researchers in the lab I worked at mentioned that his laptop was acting odd. A quick check revealed, yeap, loaded with malware including a browser extension injecting ads into every page. He mentioned that he’d been cruising video sites the other night and had installed the free viewer plugin on one of them…

Again, I don’t think that the situation is perfect or that the trade off shouldn’t be consciously reconsidered but there is a context of millions of people doing things like that. People making mistakes is a daily occurrence and even relatively savvy users can be socially engineered.

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mynameisvlad 879 days ago
To be fair, that is their viewer application. Not an actual screen sharing server. It would be very difficult for a scammer to do anything to your device or account using the app in the App Store as is.
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