Enshittification

So I remembered a bookmark I used to have and went to look in Chrome and it was there. Went to export the bookmarks and import them into my current browser. Apparently unless you are on a desktop there is no export option for Chrome in Android now? I know it exists on Chromium based browsers because it exists in Cromite.

Not sure this counts as enshittification, but it definitely seems like an effort to make users not move away from using their product.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/25026502

Banks are equally (if not more) innovative in all the creative ingenious ways to thoroughly enshitify a service while still retaining loyal patrons who accept it, lick their boots, and stay over the long haul to experience new developments in enshitification techniques.

Enshitification is the most abusive when it is forced on you. Banking is one such case in many regions.

In my futile attempt to capture it all, I began with a list of categories so the various varieties of shit can be anatomized and classified into a taxonomy of shit:

1. Direct snooping and overcollection of data
2. Indirect snooping, outsourcing, info sharing, digital footprint maximization across actors
3. Anti-competition (e.g. “relationship banking”; all war on cash actions are anti-competition)
4. Protectionism
5. Dark patterns with money
6. Tech incompetence
7. Tech-driven exclusivity and discrimination / forced use of shitty tech
8. Discrimination against who you are and your demographic
9. Diffusion of responsibilty (i.e. finger pointing mechanisms)
10. Suppression of info (e.g. outsourced entities, reporting thresholds)
11. Reduced protection of data at rest
12. Data breach “compensation” without remuneration that enlarges consumers’ digital footprint (and lost opt-out letters)
13. Reduction of services
14. Automated decision making logic without human intervention
15. Penalization of enshitification avoidance

Of course the problem is immediately evident: most instances of enshitification fit into multiple categories. I cannot think of a useful way to reduce and broaden the categories to a point where instances of enshitification can each map to just one single category.

The itemized list enshitification instances is crazy long:

(EC → Enshitification Category)

Walk-in service without appointment is going away (EC 7,15) Some banks insist on an appointment; some have even dropped the appointment option and you simply cannot meet in person.
Banks are gradually removing services from their website (EC 7,13) This is to force more people to use their dodgy app.
All banks with apps impose closed-source software (EC 10)
Most banks with apps impose Google or Apple patronage just to obtain the app (EC 2) You must share sensitive info with surveillance advertisers in a country without privacy safeguards, and disclose to those untrustworthy corps where you bank.
Some banks have shutdown their website and closed their doors (EC 2,13) Thus making a dodgy app the exclusive means of access to your acct.
Some banks plainly write in their ToS that they log your IP; some don’t tell you (EC 1,10) When the ToS mentions this, it sometimes admits the purpose is to track your whereabouts.
Some banks refuse you an account if they discover you are US-born (EC 8) [outside the US] The ones that do not refuse an account still give adversely discriminatory treatment.
Banks outsource and share your personal data w/the supplier to repudiate fault in data breaches (EC 2,9,10) This is extra insideous in the US because if you get breached from a 3rd party, the 3rd party has no legal obligation to disclose to you which of your banks hired them, and the bank has no obliation to disclose their partners to you.
Banks loosely share your personal data to minimize quanitifiable breach damages (EC 2,9) It’s hard to attribute damages to a specific breach if your data was previously “legitimately” shared all over the place anyway.
Credit bureaus break the law requiring disclosure of their sources (EC 2) [US] Credit bureaus conceal from people /who/ reported their addresses (physical and email) to them. It’s illegal but there is no penalty so the law is just ignored. Consequently, banks share that info freely.
Cash withdrawal limits are shrinking (3,4) There are daily limits and monthly limits. As they shrink, you lose the ability to escape as quickly as you one day might want to.
Reduction of ATMs (EC 3,13) Europe
ATM consortium monopolies forming (EC 2,3,9) Netherlands, Belgium. Many banks have removed all their own ATMs and joined a consortium. Competition is gone. Netherlands has whole cities that have only one exclusive ATM operator (“Geldmaat”). If it gives you bad service, you’re fucked.
Reduced ATM services (EC 3,13) Balance inquiry service is either being stripped away or limited to clients of a specific bank
Elimination of ATM receipts (EC 13) Germany
Elimination of larger banknotes from ATMs (EC 13) Netherlands and France
ATM arbitrary denial of service (EC 3,8,9,10,14) Unlawful use of automated decision making logic without human intervention and without disclosure of /why/ a transaction is denied. ATM messaging always faults the card or the issuing bank even when the ATM internally denies a transaction.
Undisclosed ATM withdrawal limits (EC 3,10,13) ATMs have different withdrawal limits depending on whether a card is foreign or domestic. They never disclose the limit.
ATMs that eat cards if PIN entry is wrong (and conceal the confiscation risk) (EC 3,5,10,14) Netherlands
ATMs that eat cards if “fraud” is suspected (and conceal the confiscation risk) (EC 3,5,10,14) Netherlands
ATMs that eat cards if it cannot read the EMV chip (and conceal the confiscation risk) (EC 3,5,10,14) Netherlands
ATMs that take a fee without disclosure or consent (EC 3,5,10) Germany
Some banks disable your card after ~3 ATM refusals (EC 3,14) They think it’s “suspicious” if ATMs refuse you in as few as 3 times consequetively despite you having to guess at what the undisclosed ATM limit is for foreign cards when visiting a foreign country.
Some banks freeze your account if your ID card on file expires (EC 1,5,10) It’s a way of communicating with customers. Instead of making the effort to inform you that your ID docs will expire, they just set the machinery to block access to your money on ID card expiry (even if that lands on a Friday and the bank is not open until Monday). It’s comparable to the method of communication used in Office Space to tell Marvin he was fired (no paycheck).
Some banks send an annual “welcome” letter (EC 1,5) It’s a sneaky way to check whether you still live at your current address. They send a useless letter periodically at your expense. If the letter is returned, they know you moved without telling them your new address.
Some banks charge extra for analog operations like paper statements (EC 15) To avoid enshitified digital platforms you naturally must switch to analog operations. But that’s not gratis at shitty banks. Penalties for avoiding enshitification is in itself an instance of enshitification.
Some banks simply outright refuse to send a paper statement (EC 1,15) Digital banks simply break the law requiring them to issue periodic statements. If you’re not on their digital platform, they will not communicate with you despite legal obligations. Tagged in cat.1 because forcing you onto their digital platform entails excessive data collection (IP address).
Some banks refuse cash deposits (EC 1,3,13) It’s a blunt refusal at some banks, and at others cash deposits impose an intrusive process of submitting proof of source (or be refused)
Some banks refuse cash withdrawals (EC 1,2,3,4,13,15)
Some banks report cash withdrawals to the police (EC 2,3,4) [Europe] Someone tried to simply withdraw a few thousand euros from her own account. The bank called the police to detained her for interrogation.
Some banks block Tor (EC 1,13) Banks can justify blocking Tor if they lack the competence to securely handle Tor connections -- but can they justify the incompetence? It’s enshitification nonetheless.
Some banks let you login over Tor, then instantly close your account (EC 1,5,13,14) [US] Some banks go to the insideous extreme of allowing customers to reach the login page over Tor only for the fucked up undisclosed purpose of discovering which of their customers use Tor. Then they close the account instantly and irreversably. To recover from this, you must open a whole new account from scratch.
Some banks refuse cash payments on a mortgage (EC 1,2,3,4)
Relationship banking→ forced account opening (EC 3,8) [Europe] Banks refuse to give you a mortgage unless you open other types of accounts. If the bank refuses you an asset account on the basis of where you were born, then they also refuse you a mortgage for not having your asset account with them. It amounts to discrimination in a housing transaction on the basis of national origin (a human rights violation). US banks do not take relationship banking to this extreme, which gives a strange inversion of what you would expect between the US and Europe.
Alcohol purchases tracked for mortgage denial (EC 1,4,8) [Europe] Some Scandinavian banks track your alcohol purchases, assume you’re drinking alone, and tag you as having a drinking a problem which then leads to mortgage denials. This showcases the stupidity of cashless bars in Netherlands.
All debits processed first in daily batches (EC 5) [US] Regardless of the sequence of your credits and debits throughout the day, at the end of the day the bank processes all debits first, then all credits. This increases the number of overdrafts, thus bank fees.
Credit cards send a paper check to refund a credit (EC 5) [US] The credit line is more profitable for banks if you are in debt. To increase debt (thus fees and interest) they disallow accounts from carrying a credit by sending a paper check and zeroing the balance. At the same time the customer’s money is inaccessible while traveling as a paper check.
Some banks send malformed email (EC 6) They assume everyone uses a graphical mail client. Many banks do not send a plaintext MIME part. And worse, some obnoxious and incompetent banks send a plaintext MIME part that says “your mail client has a problem” or ”get a better mail client”.
Some banks embed tracker pixels in email (EC 1,5) Tracker pixels are injected into email so when you open it the bank gets a signal that tells them that ① your email address is valid and you read it, ② when you read it, and ③ your IP address (which reveals other sensitive info)
Some digital banks surreptitiously use Microsoft or Google for email (EC 2,5,6) And worse: they often make it the sole means of communication.
Some banks share your email address with others (EC 2) E.g. credit bureaus
Some banks reject email forwarding addresses (EC 1,10) If supplying an email address to a bank, it’s a good practice to use a unique address just for that bank. If the address is leaked and/or abused, it enables you to trace the malpractice to the bank. For that self-defense reason, some banks reject such addresses.
Many credit unions surreptitiously expose all your most sensitive data to Cloudlare (EC 2,6,7,9,10,14) CF sees your unhashed username and pw without your knowledge. At the same time, the ToS shifts responsibility for credential leaks onto the customer.
Most CUs outsource billpay (EC 2,6,9) And the service is “free” with free postage on mailed checks. Don’t ask how it’s paid for. The few giant suppliers obviously see all the transactions they handle.
Most CUs outsource e-statements and statement printing (EC 2,6,9) The few giant suppliers obviously see all the transactions they handle.
Most CUs outsource their webservices (EC 2,6,9) The few giant suppliers obviously see all the transactions they handle.
Most CUs outsource their phone apps (EC 6)
All banks and CUs have increasingly become KYC over-achievers (EC 1) [US] They collect much more information than legally required.
Some banks close your account if they suspect you are working in the sex trade or marijuana trade (EC 8)
Some banks close your account if they suspect you buy or sell a competing financial instrument (like cryptocurrency) (EC 3,4)

Amid the non-stop increasing enshitification of banks, Bruce Schneier said: “cryptocurrency is a solution looking for a problem”. Really, Schneier? You can’t find any problems with banks and credit unions?

The ultimate refuge from enshitification (of any kind) is non-participation. Boycotts. But forced-banking has quietly become reality in some regions, like Europe. Enshitification is therefore forced. There is no right to boycott. Even living off-grid and self-employed does not solve the problem when the gov’s tax regime refuses cash payments and requires bank transfers.

EDIT: please mention any instances of enshitification not mentioned in my list. Would be nice to have a comprehensive overview in one place.

cross-posted from: https://sopuli.xyz/post/7561562

There is hardly any discussion on this trending variety of web enshitification where a website needs to give physical locations to people. Many web devs are starting to spotlight their profound incompetence in accomplishing this very simple task. They throw up an interactive map which requires the full utilization of fancy GUI browser frills with 3rd party js enabled, which excludes all but those who “chase the shiny”. A 1990s high schooler could handle this better in plain HTML.

Doesn’t this screw over blind people? How does a screen reader handle a map?

My hardened low-bandwidth browser can’t handle this absurd degree of putting fancy above access equality. When this shit happens on a vendor’s website and I’m trying to locate them to give them business, the answer is easy: they can fuck off and lose my business. But it’s sad when a government does it and the information has medical relevance.

The attachment is a page from the annual report by a national ombudsman produced for politicians who use the stats in policy making. The ombudsman accepts complaints online and also by analog means. The annual report considers the method of complaint submission a “key figure”.

This report shows 77% of submissions to be electronic. It indicates the digital platform is a “success”, to some extent. I’m not sure what their goal or expectation is, but there is certainly no shame or defeat in that figure. They are likely patting themselves on the back.

When a platform is enshitified, we need that metric to reflect failure. Suppose hypothetically their goal is 90% digital. They will investigate why 23% of complainants are submitting paper, calling, or appearing in person. Suppose such investigation were to find:

• 14% lack digital literacy
• 6% have no easy access to the Internet
• 3% other (e.g. refusal of enshitified platforms)

(^fabricated sample figures) They will ignore the 3% because it’s too small to help reach their goal. They will work on improving public access to the Internet (via libraries). They will recruit digitally competent people to help the elderly (and in fact they just started this.. called the “digital buddy program”).

In any case, if you dance for them and navigate their hurdles to submit an electronic form, whether you like it or not your submission sends a clear signal that the digital platform is a success. You therefore serve as an enabler.

Complaining despite being an enabler is generally insufficient. See part 2 of 3.

There is immense pressure on public administrations now to respect the environment. They have obligations to satisify green policy objectives which includes pushing the “digital transformation” down our throats. They care more about that than public satisfaction. They also know that environmental policy influences election votes much more than digital rights policy.

If you simply complain about enshitification despite using the platform and thereby creating a metric to the contrary, the complaint is just seen as “someone is unhappy”. They may or may not count unhappy campers. But even if they do, it’s a lower priority metric.

We often must choose between fighting enshitification or protecting the environment. We cannot have it both ways in many situations. If you do everything digitally, there is no question you are whole-hog supporting enshitified platforms.

Casting an anti-enshitification vote requires using analog methods like snail-mail. The “right to be analog” movement (!right_to_unplug@sopuli.xyz) goes hand-in-hand with anti-enshitification¹. We need to protect the postal service. The threat is real, considering Denmark has eliminated their postal service nation-wide this year. The postal service is our refuge from enshitification. Without postal service, you are absolutely forced to eat their digital shit.

IMO climate activists have a tendency to exaggerate anyway. The GHG footprint of a paper letter and envelope is overblown, while at the same time the GHG footprints of digital transactions are downplayed. No one talks about how a graphical image on the stationary of an email payload exceeds the CO₂ footprint of a paper envelope.

See How to cast your anti-enshitification vote.

¹ In fact, note to mods: consider adding !right_to_unplug@sopuli.xyz as a related community in the sidebar.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/24684125

My fight against enshitification entails hand-delivering paper correspondence by bicycle. I also re-use the windowed envelopes that I receive. When I run out those, I leave the envelope unsealed so the recipient can easily reuse the new envelope.

The recipient generally must use the postal service to reply. And rightly so. Penalizing them with the cost of printing and posting serves as a means to punish them for the enshitified digital path they offer. For me, this approach sufficiently casts my anti-enshitification votes while supporting the postal service that gives refuge from enshitification, without excessive environmental detriment.

The LaTeX scrlttr2 class is useful for using and re-using windowed envelopes. If the envelope is standard, the geometry may be known to the supplied KOMAscript machinery. If not, a few measurements can be given as parameters to align an address in a custom window.

To load the US №9 standard envelope, you would start with:

\documentclass[UScommercial9]{scrlttr2}

or for the French standard:

\documentclass[NF]{scrlttr2}

If you reuse a non-standard windowed envelope, you can put the following in the preamble and tamper with the measurements as needed:

\makeatletter
\setplength{foldmarkhpos}{4.2mm}   % default=3.5mm; distance from paper edge to fold mark; should account for the unprintable area of your printer
\setplength{tfoldmarkvpos}{108mm}  % default=99mm; distance between top fold mark and top paper edge
\setplength{firstheadwidth}{190mm} % default=170mm for NF and \paperwidth for others; width of letterhead
\setplength{firstheadvpos}{10mm}   % default=15mm for NF; distance from top edge to letterhead
\setplength{toaddrvpos}{40mm}      % default=35mm; distance between top of window and top paper edge
\setplength{toaddrhpos}{98mm}      % default=-10mm; distance from the left edge of the paper to the address field (if positive)
\setplength{toaddrindent}{5mm}     % default=10mm; left and right indentation of the address within the to-address box
\setplength{toaddrheight}{40mm}    % default=45mm
\makeatother

I'm posting this as I think it meets the criteria for enshittification of services, they just happen to be government services this time.

The whole capitalist infrastructure is designed for corporations to fully exploit profitability to the most extreme possible result. Sure, we can blame capitalism, which is a useless activity. In fact, it’s a harmful stance because blaming capitalism artificially puts solutions out of reach.

Within this capitalist system we are stuck with, can you blame the corporate enshitifiers? Again, same problem. Doing so puts the solution out of reach as corporations who work for their shareholders (not you) laugh all the way to bank.

It’s our fault. We have control and we squander it. You don’t have to solve CAPTCHA puzzles. You don’t have to switch to the clearnet every time a website blocks Tor. You don’t have to send a message to a GAFAM recipient. It’s because spineless pushovers fail to stand up for themselves and solve CAPTCHAs, tolerate cookie walls, and do whatever dance the corps force on us. We need more people to get a constitution and stop licking boots.

Corporations are doing their job (profiting). We are not doing our job. As consumers, it is OUR job to reject the garbage and ensure that we don’t make enshitification profitable.

PewDiePie on Enshittification: It's about Big Tech in general!

Unnecessary subscriptions, ads, locking, updates being changing the entire UI because you're more prone somehow to get locked-in.

Full video: I'm DONE with Google.

Broadcom stopped selling VMware perpetual licenses in November 2023 in favor of pushing a small number of VMware SKUs that feature multiple VMware offerings. Since Broadcom is forcefully bundling VMware products, the costs associated with running VMware have skyrocketed, with customers frequently citing 300 percent price hikes and some firms claiming even larger increases. As a result, some VMware users have opted to keep using VMware perpetual licenses, even though Broadcom refuses to renew most of those clients’ support services.

This year, Broadcom started sending such VMware users cease-and-desist letters [PDF], telling organizations to stop using any maintenance releases/updates, minor releases, major releases/upgrades extensions, enhancements, patches, bug fixes, or security patches (except for zero-day security patches) that VMware issued since the user’s support contract ended.

The letters also warned of potential audits, which appear to be underway now.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/21966139

A lot of tech knowledge is jailed in #StackOverflow, #StackExchange. Too much. The tech world is very dependant on this single gate keeper. This week, freedom to access SE’s indispensible tech knowledge has been lost.

Timeline

• pre-2016: SE jailed itself inside Cloudflare
• ? - At some point SE became “openly” accessible and Cloudflare-free. But a massive #cookieWall blocked content and it was broken to a large extent. That is, in some browsers there was no way to get past the cookie wall.
• 2022 - #AnonymousOverflow was founded. This front-end platform made the cookie wall problem go away regardless of your browser and anonymity.
• 2023 - SE reverted back to Cloudflare, effectively making the need for AnonymousOverflow more dire; more important.
• This week - SE tunes the Cloudflare settings to aggressively block AnonymousOverflow instances, ultimately killing off free-world access to tech information.

Ok so I don’t need to tell you that prices for basically everything you buy have been climbing faster than they really should be

Sustained inflation has been a major problem in most major economies around the world for almost half a decade at this point, BUT there are other… sneakier ways that your spending power is being eroded, that get much less attention but probably do much more harm.

You might already know about shrinkflation, where instead of the goods you purchase just getting more expensive, they stay at the same price, but they get smaller.

Toblerone’s that look like this when they used to look like this, YouTube play buttons that looked like this now look like this, or the packets of Oreos that are half empty for some reason, and if you were ever wondering why you can’t get a nice girthy can of soda anymore, well shrinkflation is probably to blame.

The price tag may have stayed the same, but you are still getting less for your dollar, and you need to repeat your purchases more often, so in the end it’s the same thing as just raising prices.

The problem for companies is that people are starting to catch onto this… in some countries food items now need to be labelled with their total price as well as the price per kilogram of the products inside.

Now this video isn’t about regular inflation or even shrinkflation, it’s about shitflation, which is probably costing you a lot more than these other 2, while also hurting your health, wasting your time, and just being a massive inconvenience.

“The average American,” Zuckerberg says, “has fewer than three friends, fewer than three people they would consider friends. And the average person has demand for meaningfully more. I think it's something like 15 friends or something.”

Zuck thinks AI should fill this demand. The future isn’t the Metaverse anymore. The future is Meta’s phantom AIs that will pal around with you and slake your thirst for social interactions. It’s like Mark Zuckerberg heard about Zombie Internet Theory and decided it was a feature, not a bug.

And I guess I’m just curious who possibly wants this future. Who is this for? Why? You have all the money in the world. Why can’t you focus on building something interesting? Or at least just stop degrading your own existing product?

I suspect Mark Zuckerberg’s phantom-friend-network will follow the same route as his ghost-town of a metaverse. He’ll spend tens of billions chasing a future that no one actually wants.

I do not want AI companions to replace or augment my actual friendships. That sounds hollow, pathetic, sad. A world where we have four times as many AI friends as real friends is a world where we have just, collectively, given up.

And I don’t think this is a radical statement either. A future filled with AI companions is plainly a dystopia to be avoided, not a benchmark to strive for.

Googling about an event in a Europen micro-nation, I ended up in an archive of the 1957 LIFE magazine. I was shocked at how reminiscent it is of modern news website, with advertisement everywhere that does its best to blend in and pretend it is content.

The next generation of "smart" TVs, that nobody asked for:

"LG TVs will soon leverage an AI model built for showing advertisements that more closely align with viewers' personal beliefs and emotions. The company plans to incorporate a partner company’s AI tech into its TV software in order to interpret psychological factors impacting a viewer, such as personal interests, personality traits, and lifestyle choices. The aim is to show LG webOS users ads that will emotionally impact them."