Apple takes down ICE tracking apps after pressure from DOJ
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Remember CSAM and how it got withdrawn? https://www.apple.com/child-safety/pdf/CSAM_Detection_Techni...
What if the government asks for sentiment analysis? Thoughtcrime detection? Always-on audio collection? Always-on location logging?
All the things we were afraid of are simple technically and the only thing stopping it is a few executives of a trillion dollar company who must report earnings to shareholders.
Just business
It is unsurprising for it to get removed, as companies must follow the law.
B) Even if there was a law, its the duty of every American to disobey unjust laws. The government serves at the pleasure of the people, not the other way around. There are a lot of people getting awfully comfortable with weak men ordering other jack booted weak men to systematically tear down what actually makes America great. I thought we settled this last time, but maybe we need to revisit the issue.
As "Amusing Ourselves to Death"[1] would explain, what almost all Apple consumers want is just FaceBook, WhatsApp, memes and games. Anything else is "boooring!".
We live in an Idiocracy[2]. Deal with it.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death
I've been boycotting Amazon as best I can for nearly a decade though since they had ambulances outside their warehouses and delivery workers pissing in gatorade bottles but reducing consumption of toxic brands can be done and is effective at sending messages when done en masse.
I also boycott all the social media companies, Disney, Google as much as possible.
Sadly, there's not a ton of options in this space (computer electronics).
I've also e-mailed tim.cook@apple.com and expressed my opinions in a polite manner. Maybe someone read it. Who knows.
Stand up, fight back!
Jokes aside, when has pandering to people to change the status quo of colloquial word use ever worked?
The importance of FOSS mobile OSes is greater than ever now.
The current European Commision president: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/zensursula
The previous president, Juncker, was the premier who made Luxembourg a taxhaven. Nowadays buying from Amazon in Europe you still get a purchase receipt from Amazon Luxembourg...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45411426
It's really quite worrying how all these things (age verification, chat control, side-loading prevention, etc.) seem to be coming to bear in tandem across many countries.
to clarify I get it's Mobian or Postmarket etc... which you could put on an Android phone but yeah
edit: the other thing was built in ads especially on cheaper phones like what you'd get at say Boost Mobile which I imagine is one of those subsidized costs thing phone is cheap because it's riddled with ads.
So it’s the same then. Google can just “unverify” a developer who has published an app the kings don’t approve of.
“How does developer verification impact my use of Android Studio?
We are working to ensure these changes don’t have an impact on your day-to-day workflow so you can continue building your apps as smoothly as possible. Participating in developer verification will not affect your experience in Android Studio, the official IDE for Android app development. You will continue to be able to build and run an app even if your identity is not verified. Android Studio is unaffected because deployments performed with adb, which Android Studio uses behind the scenes to push builds to devices, is unaffected. You can continue to develop, debug, and test your app locally by deploying to both emulators and physical devices, just as you do now.”
Lies
The workflow of Free Software developers, developing consumer software (a vital part of the software ecosystem) will be entirely jammed up and subject to the capricious whims of Google
To all intents and purposes it is not allowed, then. Google becomes the gate keeper by controlling registration
"Trust us"
According to Grok, "In March 2011, four Democratic senators—Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), Harry Reid (D-Nev.), Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.), and Tom Udall (D-N.M.)—sent letters to Apple, Google, and Research in Motion (BlackBerry's parent company) urging the removal of such apps […]"
So, we have precedent where four Democratic senators pressured Apple to remove an app that allowed people to evade law enforcement.
No, they continued to allow police location apps (Google maps will even tell you where they are).
The language they added to the app store rules were very specific: "Apps may only display DUI checkpoints that are published by law enforcement agencies, and should never encourage drunk driving or other reckless behavior such as excessive speed."
Whether or not that was a good idea at the time (it wasn't), you can't claim this is covered by the same guidelines.
I’m not questioning whether you should be able to do it. I’m really curious.
When Churchill made that famous quip about the "average voter" he was talking about the kind of people who complain out of one side of their mouth about law enforcement going hard on a particular class of laws they don't like while stating out the other that anyone who doesn't want to submit to a papers-please stop on the pretext of catching people engaged in a fairly common misdemeanor that they do want to see hard enforcement on is abetting said misdemeanor.
* You don't want your trip to be delayed
* You object to police checkpoints in principle
* You or your friends or family have had negative experiences with law enforcement, so you prefer to minimize contact
* You share a car with family members, one of whom smoked cannabis in it; the smell will result in an extended detention and investigation at a checkpoint
* Your license/registration/insurance is not current
* You are an undocumented immigrant
* There is a warrant for your arrest
So, putting all that together, imagine this sequence: cop at a DUI checkpoint asks me to perform a field sobriety test. I refuse, either without giving a reason or citing my ADHD and tic disorder. They ask me if I'm taking any medicine for ADHD. I don't lie and either confirm that fact or plead the fifth, or even if I do lie they still might not believe me. I probably don't have the pills or the bottle with me since I wouldn't usually be taking it in the car anyway. They then insist on a blood test, either with consent or with a quickly obtained warrant. I then have to accept a long detour going for the blood test, and then spend a lot of time and money proving in court both that I had a legal prescription and that I was not legally impaired by the medicine. (Even if I do have the correctly labeled pill bottle with me in the car, the cop still might incorrectly assume the medicine impairs me.)
Avoiding this hassle is a perfectly legal and legitimate reason to want to know where DUI checkpoints are.
Nothing I'm saying is condoning driving drunk - I certainly don't do that. When I drink, I pay attention to the advice of blood alcohol content calculators to figure out when I'm safe to drive and when it's fully out of my system. And when I take medicines that interact with alcohol, I'm even more cautious with drinking than when I don't.
What purpose outside abetting in avoiding a DUI is there for publishing a live map of DUI checkpoints?
I wouldn't code it because there's no way to disallow the service for the set of people over the legal limit trying to avoid a DUI checkpoint. But if, say, a group of sober civil libertarians find a way to tell each other how to always choose right-exercising routes, I don't see any obvious ethical problems with that.
I strongly doubt this was a reason for the app though.
Congressional dysfunction isn't an excuse to allow the creation of a shadow government orchestrated by the executive but here we are.
What is that policy?
> According to Grok
Why did you ask an LLM which is manipulated by a single person when he doesn't like facts?
> So, we have precedent where four Democratic senators pressured Apple to remove an app that allowed people to evade law enforcement.
Yes, senators sent letters to several companies. Apple listened. What would have happened if it didn't? What would happen to Apple if they don't listen now?
Do you sincerely believe that both situations are comparable?
How are they not? In both cases US government officials applied pressure and implied legal action to force private companies to act in ways that enabled law enforcement to act with less resistance. It’s why we should always push back against government overreach and bullying. Because the “slippery slope” might be a logical fallacy, but that doesn’t stop it from also being the most likely outcome of the government pushing the boundaries.
That's like saying cooking is comparable with stabbing someone because both involve moving a knife back and forth. Give me a break.
Probably because it doesn't technically advertise it as such, just "hey something requiring police presence is around".
ICEBlock should rebrand as a generic "police activity" app and have a category "other" that everyone understands is ICE but isn't labelled as such.
Nominally the purpose of speed enforcement is to reduce vehicle speeds, which Waze notifications achieve.
Waze - at least in my country - did remove COVID checkpoints during lockdowns, so they don't allow all reports.
Because the right to share police locations is protected by the 1st amendment
Senators gave no individual direct control over regulation. They can influence appointments or influence legislation, which is still power backing the implied threat, but that's a much more roundabout threat than a single person with direct power to destroy your business.
Do you have any sources that aren't prone to hallucination and fits of partisan, racially-charged, conspiratorial hysteria?
At least one source I found says that "Apple and Google did not give in" https://reason.com/2011/05/23/no-app-for-that/
I don't think a situation like this is impossible, quite the opposite, but let's try to not invent facts please.
It's like they don't understand what's possible to be coerced into from there. They cite "danger to users" as the rationale, but their imagination of danger is so damn limited
I wouldn't pretend to understand the Android app ecosystem better than Google.
A charitable guess would be that Google understands that forcing developer registration will introduce more risk for some people, but overall the total risk over the entire population is reduced. It's a net benefit.
Surely you must see the other side of this in that there is massive fraud taking place via Android phones?
Most privately installed apps are for open source degoogled software that doesn't want to bother with Google.
Just refuse to report on or post about new product launches without mentioning it.
Press is an large thing for Apple. Multiple times now they've only sprung into action when the press got on their arse about something (faulty HDD cables/video cards in Macbook Pros, faulty keyboards, etc). Press getting on them could push them to take an actual stance, or at least explain why (bowing to the dictator in this case).
Getting people off of for-profit news would be great, though I admit it's a blue sky proposal
These corporations have effectively built their own club of chosen mouthpieces who are willing to excuse negatives about a product to make money.
Same thing at White House press conferences, push push push them relentlessly with questions that make them uncomfortable... make them squirm.
Press who always allow the other side to control the narrative deserve to die out. I know this is all easier said than done, but holy crap we are making it so easy for them to walk over us right now, we could at least do something.
Give me guarantees, or the closest approximation. Federation, distribution, dispersion of authority, interoperability.
What’s the incentive?
I want decentralization because States oppress people and I want resistance to that to persist, others think like me such as the inventor of the Signal protocol hence why it was invented. If you need to describe that as incentive, cool beans.
Apple did the whole show with FBI because it was convenient for them. They bend the knee faster than anyone when things get a little uncomfortable.
The people in China see nothing of the "standing up to the government" reputation and never really have. At least Google decided to pull out when the government started demanding they hand over data and apply censorship, Apple just complied and started storing data where the CCP can get to it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21210678 ("Apple Removes HKmap.live from the App Store" (2019); 893 comments)
But they only want to support native iOS for whatever reason (they've listed their reasons: https://www.iceblock.app/android, I just don't personally believe them to be technically accurate/truthful).
It's harder to be anon with an app that with a web page because you have to cater for all the web things PLUS Android.
Why not? If you can pressure someone into fighting your fight for you, you do it.
Maybe we're not asking them to fight our fights, but to stop tipping the scales one way or the other. There's a difference between asking them to aid progressive or regressive causes vs. actually staying neutral. If it's too big a moral burden on Apple or Google, then allow us to run whatever we want on our devices.
Apple market themselves as being an ethical choice of companies regarding human rights, when they throw that out the window with shit like this, people get pissed.
An "overthrow" would be highly undemocratic and it's very curious to hear the same people that claim Trump is literally Hitler talk about "overthrowing" their (democratically elected) political enemies and then "punishing collaborators". Is there no sense of self-awareness at all?
-SCOTUS majority, American GOP.
Why should they? There’s no app called “web browser” on the phone. But there may be “Safari” or “Google Chrome”. Do they know what those are?
If you told them “go to <some web address>”, could they do it?
As are apps, as this submission demonstrates. Websites at least have quick methods of recovery by changing domains or servers.
By Apple, because it's Apple that a) refuses to implement advanced PWA features in WebKit and b) refuses to allow apps to use other browser engines.
They could even call it something like Google Safe Browsing to make it sound good to people.
Maybe the app enabled violence against law enforcement - but Waymo does that too by telling you where traffic cops are. Or Google Maps and Yellow Pages for documenting the location of police stations. Undercover officers, ICE or otherwise, aren't given any special exemptions to the law here.
Discoverability of PWAs is quite bad. I'd love them to become more popular, but attempted solutions range from "user manually needs to hit the install button in a menu" to banners capable of saying "install freewhatsappupdate.xyz for exclusive whatsapp deals"/"click install to verify you're human".
Microsoft actually tried to bring more attention to web apps by adding them to their app store, but nobody uses the MS app store.
The software on our primary machines used to not need blessing, but that too changed.
But since it exists, it can be abused.
I keep hoping enough people inside Google still give a shit to push back on their plan, but I'm not banking on it.
The idea of a world where users have no control over their own devices is just too attractive for the oligarchs.
This looks like another enterprise like "war on terror" that costed trillions, hasn't given anything USA, but lack of money for infrastructure, healthcare, education and degradation of the middle class, which is in every democracy a stabilizing power - they have a lot of to lose, so they don't vote on extremists.
Current administration is very right about bringing back manufacturing back to USA, but they forget that without roads, railways, electricity lines and, the most important, workforce, they will not be able to do that.
If I had to mind read the admin, I would imagine they intend ICE to go after the hardened criminals who, making a profit or being wanted, won't self deport under any circumstance.
Meanwhile most people who have just migrated illegally will generally self deport or do a really good job of blending in.
Obviously ICE is still going to sweep up anyone and everyone they can. The fed exists, and has always existed, to be a boot not a scalpel.
In theory local law enforcement is supposed to be the more targeted localized tool but because immigration enforcement has become partisan, they are either restricted from doing anything migration related or are going overboard to suck up to the fed.
Systems out of alignment grow more severe.
The real purpose is to establish an unaccountable form of political violence and intimidation, similiar to the Sturmabteilung in 1920's Germany.
The famous "First they came for..." poem comes to mind.
i dropped my tack on the map; i saw waldo about 100 feet to the north.
Thats weird because you dont need iceblock to know that ICE is at an ICE facility
Its for when they’re spotted in neighborhoods
dumb rationale, dumb response
I don’t know that that is fair.
This framing is designed to shame people into feeling guilty for their point of view, rather than their actions.
Being complicit means to be knowingly involved in or facilitating an illegal or wrongdoing act. In my books, it requires a level of participation that I don’t think your characterization meets.
And this centralised censorship regimes isn't new. It is exactly the same during Hong Kong protest in 2019.
Is it blocked globally, or only for U.S. app store phones? Are downloads blocked, or is the app being removed from phones it's already on?
Capitulating over this is Apple showing their supposed core values have significantly hollowed
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45461951
No surprise here, all companies would do the same. But I was planning on moving to Apple once my current Android fails, not now.
I am hoping the Linux Phone I hear about advances to the point where my Cell Service supports it. Will see because I am pretty much done with Android and Apple.
It's one of the things that will finally allow us to supplant the yoke of the state, by having our own decentralized emergency response systems.
When will we realize this benefit? Do we really have to wait for Apple to fall?
[1] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/usernotifications/...
> "We reached out to Apple today demanding they remove the ICEBlock app from their App Store — and Apple did so," Bondi said in a statement to Fox News Digital.
I don't think this is something that trump or biden should be allowed to do, but the classic argument that your constitutional right to free speech ends when the president "politely" asks a software company to censor you on his behalf and they acquiesce is equally [in]valid in both situations.
Make ICE spotting a plausibly deniable covert subtext via an otherwise popular medium.
Like (probably apocryphal) Jesus fish.
Both Pokemon and Polytopia have ice themed combatants, right?
Whenever you see some masked thugs staging for another round of terror, start a match as one of those tribes, trainers, or whatever. Build a certain kind of (creature) deck recognizable by anyone "in the know". Use some kind of slang. Like WWII's code talkers.
I don't actually know how Pokemon and the multiplayer Polytopia work. But y'all get the idea.
I keep thinking of the "slug bug" game bored kids play in the back seat. See a VW Beetle, yell "slug bug" first, and then punch your sibling. I think "Eye Spy" is the nice version.
Do mobile games like that exist? Surely someone's done it. A Foursquare for kids. Or something.
Again, y'all get the idea.
and until it happens and even after it happens people will be saying “it’s not so bad”
Checkout quasar.dev
really sucks ease of use is a 2 edge sword
Legal is not always moral, and Apple has shown they will side with those in power, _not_ with those who own the tech.
If Apple is prepared to do this, what else are they prepared to snitch on your for.
If it can be abused, it will be abused.
The acquiescence of megacorps is essential for fascism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_collaboration_with_Na...
JUST SAY NO!
I cannot believe it's really happening. Few months ago it was just jokes...
FTFY Fox :)
When a group is performing unconstitutional activities they should be tracked and stopped where possible.
But it's also just plain overbroad: the same logic applies to Waze flagging of speed traps, which are also "crowd sourced law enforcement location data".
Basically this is bunk. The app got banned because the government doesn't want its enforcement actions disrupted by protestors, and whined[1] to Apple to coerce them into a ban.
[1] Plausibly threatened. It's not alleged here but they did it to Disney and Paramount already.
The entire thing reeks of the same Biden-era pressures on companies that had pandemic misinformation that Republicans were so vehemently opposed to. Somehow harming law enforcement is a better justification than harming random citizens.