Matt Gutman at the 19th Annual Stand Up for Heroes held at David Geffen Hall at The Lincoln Center on November 10, 2025 in New York, New York. (Photo by Adela Loconte/Variety via Getty Images)
Variety via Getty Images
Some legislation, no matter how perilous, just won’t die. This comes to mind as rumors start to swirl that Congress is contemplating reviving Rep. Kat Cammack’s App Store Freedom Act.
The Act would regulate “dominant” mobile app marketplaces with over 100 million users, and would among other things require them to allow third-party app stores onto their platforms. Most dangerously, the Act would enable “sideloading” of third-party apps as a way around the downloading of apps from official stores like Google Play Store or Apple App Store.
To grasp the foolhardy and anti-consumer nature of Cammack’s legislation, it’s useful to pivot to Matt Gutman. He is 48-years-old, and rather notably chief correspondent for CBS News.
Gutman’s job indicates that he’s not just sophisticated, but also of an age where familiarity with technology has long been his daily norm. Yet as Gutman recounted last week on X, a fraud investigator with Bank of America called him, gained his trust with Badge ID numbers and personal details very specific to Gutman, and then convinced the newsman to withdraw thousands from his BofA account…The only problem was that the fraud investigator wasn’t with BoA. Luckily Gutman grew wise to the scam before the theft could occur, and better yet, used social media to publicize his near miss.
Why the digression to Gutman and banking in a piece meant to call into question the App Store Freedom Act? It’s a way of hopefully conveying to readers just how effective and seemingly normal scam artists have become. Translated, the days of the friends of Nigerian princes asking for your assistance in moving millions through your bank account are long gone.
Those eager to separate individuals from their savings today have graduated to the big leagues, and they have Artificial Intelligence (AI) to help them. As Juleanna Glover, CEO of corporate consultancy Ridgely Walsh recently described it in the New York Times, hackers can now use AI to clone the voices of those close to the person about to be scammed, then use the artificially created voices of work colleagues and family to get around two-factor-identification barriers to personal accounts.
With the rising technological skill of scammers well in mind, it’s more crucial than ever that those who know technology best work diligently to deter them. It speaks to the danger of the mis-named App Store Freedom Act (AFSA). It essentially frees scammers to use Google and Apple’s App Stores as their playgrounds. The anti-consumer nature of AFSA is hopefully evident from this.
If the app stores are opened up to any and all third parties by legislative fiat, the ease of scams will only grow as the most sophisticated technology companies in the world (most would agree that Apple and Google rate the previous description) are deterred from carefully vetting who can and can’t interact with their customers. It’s not just that every app creator wants shelf space at Apple and Google in the same way that every would-be product guru wants to be at Walmart and Target, it’s that every would-be thief wants easy access to the users of those app stores.
Which means the most successful app marketplaces must be able to protect their turf not just because they grew popular and prosperous thanks to careful curation of their digital shelves, but because Apple and Google personify a sophisticated barrier to thieves that scam artists are unequal to. Here’s hoping AFSA proponents are listening.
As wealth grows, so will grow efforts to rob the creators of it. AFSA unwisely gives thieves much greater access to potential theft victims, and must be stopped with them in mind.