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by pratyushsood 83 days ago
Government apps should absolutely be held to a higher standard than consumer B2C apps. Loading Google Fonts is one thing — sending telemetry to OneSignal and Facebook from an official government app is a different conversation entirely.

In Australia, apps handling government data must comply with the PSPF (Protective Security Policy Framework) and the ISM, which explicitly restrict data flows to untrusted third parties. A government app routing 77% of requests externally would fail an IRAP assessment on day one.

The fix is straightforward: self-host fonts, use first-party analytics, and treat every external request as a data exfiltration vector. Government digital teams know how to do this — the question is whether anyone is actually reviewing the network behavior post-deployment

2 comments

They actually are held to a higher standard. We just dont follow standards in this admin.
> Government apps should absolutely be held to a higher standard than consumer B2C apps

Honestly—why? What is in this traffic that mandates heightened scrutiny? It strikes me as simply about brand.

Despite all the sneed on display, it's currently #4 in the App Store (ahead of Threads, Gmail, and Google Maps) and #1 in News so they did something right.

Personally, I want the most stringent CORS settings to read about his gold Sharpie pens.

> it's currently #4 in the App Store (ahead of Threads, Gmail, and Google Maps) and #1 in News so they did something right

Not disagreeing. But why should its provenance force a higher standard? It’s a glorified news app, to my understanding. Is its breaching worse for national security than some weather app that had its moment in the sunlight?

Because it is at some level officially backed by the White House. That alone brings higher scrutiny.
That is a reassertion of the same claim. What is the reason why?