alt Hacker News> People running de-Googled phones chose those setups because they read the data practices, understood what Play Services phones home about, and decided they didn’t consent.
This is wrong. Many (most?) users of alternative Android OSes do use a variant of the Play Services (be it sandboxed Play Services like on GrapheneOS, or an open source, reverse engineered implementation like microG that phones home just the same).
Google seems to be leveraging Play Integrity here, which requires that the phone OS is signed by Google. This is clearly anticompetitive, I hope the DMA will do something about that.
Replies
mnadkvlb • today at 9:31 AM
Exactly. Imagine them blocking captchas on iphone or windows
There is a fundamental tension here though - suppose DMA or something requires that online providers recognise reCAPTCHAs from non-Google-attested OS builds. What OSs can they safely trust?
Only ones that are difficult for fraudsters to use to generate bogus traffic. Whether or not those builds come from Google, they are inherently gonna be pretty constrained OSs. It's not gonna let you spoof your location or simulate user input.
I do think it's a problem if only Google can provide these attestations but even if that organisation problem is solved there is still a fundamental technologic problem here now that humans can't be detected by their ability to solve puzzles any more.