At this point I'm convinced that there's something deeply wrong with how our society treats technology.

Ruining Android for everyone to try to maybe help some rather technologically-hopeless groups of people is the wrong solution. It's unsustainable in the long run. Also, the last thing this world needs right now is even more centralization of power. Especially around yet another US company.

People who are unwilling to figure out the risks just should not use smartphones and the internet. They should not use internet banking. They should probably not have a bank account at all and just stick to cash. And the society should be able to accommodate such people — which is not that hard, really. Just roll back some of the so-called innovations that happened over the last 15 years. Whether someone uses technology, and how much they do, should be a choice, not a burden.

> People who are unwilling to figure out the risks just should not use smartphones and the internet.

Sounds great in theory, but just today I was reminded how impossible this is when walking back from lunch, I noticed all the parking meters covered with a hood, labelled with instructions on how to pay with the app.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatchewan/city-of-regina-r...

What do you mean by impossible in this case? Can't you just have the coin-operated parking meters back? Where I live, in EU, parking meters even take cards.

EDIT: I guess "just" is doing some heavy-lifting, so I won't argue this further, but "impossible" isn't the word I would use either. The city could revert this decision, definitely if enough people wanted them to (that's... I know, the hardest part). I just agree with the OP that we technically could go back to slightly less-digital society.

...are you implying that digital money is worth more than digital?

because I doubt anyone who spends cash regularly is holding much of it long enough to lose value to the digital ones in their checking account.