Apple drops ICE tracking apps from its store after Trump DOJ demand

For anyone with any inclination to believe the marketing that megacorpos will stand for some kind of lofty techno-libertarian ideal of somehow standing up to strongmen tyrannical governments...

I wish to remind us all of how IBM acted in WWII

And corporate business dealings with a clearly evil Nazi regime before and sometimes after the outbreak of the war itself.

And on the surface, corporations pretended to have more respect and decorum back then! Now the mask is off and they know nobody will touch them.

All of these big tech companies complicit with Nazi tyranny need to be put in their place. They've caused too much destruction and continue to do so.

Since it is both expensive and time-consuming for people to just up and switch to (thing that doesn't exist yet) - everyone should at least review their subscriptions. If paying for a sub through Apple, cancel it. Subscribe directly to the vendor if you really need it. Stop paying for Apple's cloud services, and cancel any other Apple sub.

If your phone/tablet/computer is getting old and needs replacement, get a new battery, back it up, reset to defaults, it'll feel like a new phone as long as the hardware is working.

If devices need replacement, look into used/refurbished rather than new.

Donate money or time to projects like postmarketOS, LineageOS, GrapheneOS, Meshtastic if you have the means. We all really need to get off of big tech and back to the open Internet without these walled companies, but it will take a lot of work to dethrone them. It can be done though!

GAFAM will always bend to the dictator. It took 15 minutes for google to change its maps to "golf of america" because woke up and had this idea.

Do you suppose if we keep giving into the demands of a fascist that he'll stop making demands?

Can't make demands if there's nobody left to make demands to.
I'm still convinced the app was a honey pot.
No one heard about it until media started reporting about it, then it took this long to take it down while Tim Cock was giving trump bribes. Like that cheap acrylic thing with 24k gold stand.
There was already a website that reported ICE locations without risk of sending your location to someone.
- If it were a honeypot, why would Trump tell Apple to remove it?
Surely there are only so many demands he can make before he's fully satisfied, right?

It shouldn’t have been an app. It should be a website.

Lots of things are apps even though a website would have been good enough or better. It’s just insane these days.
- Agreed. And those apps are nearly always just embedded web browsers!

Joshua presented at this year's HOPE.

https://schedule.hope.net/hope16/talk/8Y9D9Z/

ICEBlock and the Age of Digital Activism

I don't think they have (yet?) sliced up their videos into separate talks, but it starts about here....the amount of questions/challenges about security was indicative of the community, I'd say.

https://youtu.be/Pm4tC2Mnabs?t=22318

These need to be WebApps people

And this is why your manufacturer entirely controlling what can be installed shouldn't even be legal, let alone default.
Exactly! If your app can be wiped off the face of the Internet on a moment’s notice, you’re clearly putting way too many eggs in one basket. Even a mobile friendly website would be good, but a proper web app would be so much nicer.

This would be cool - spread it across multiple platforms, repositories, ect. It'll be nearly impossible to get rid of as long as the API isn't targeted itself. Trusting apple/google is a losing game in the long run. FOSS

Honestly, it should be a Signal bot. Self hostable, or with a website somewhere outside the US run by someone who is never coming here, if your group is not into doing self hosting. We should be in this for the long haul and encouraging good practices, I think. It freaks me out that people are using Reddit for 50501 and putting this stuff on their phones where they can see who has it installed.
- I cannot tell you how many conversations I've had with people that work in tech, and theoretically (?) know some history about how things have come and gone - they might even remember things like AIM or Yahoo messenger, etc., might be aware, vaguely, about XMPP or Matrix or IRC, and yet....they rush to use wholly corporate owned and controlled things like Slack which does not have E2E encryption and probably never will, or Discord, or....
  The problem with most of the "techbros" is that most people either don't know any history and are not encouraged to learn it, either, because, well, that's "old", so what could you possibly learn from it, or there is just so much hivemind thinking that even people that do know history tend to be fearful of bringing it up, else they look like they aren't "cool".
  It's all rather embarrassing to watch, really, as someone that actively DID seek to learn from my elders in tech and have been doing this for decades. The overall industry seems to have the memory of a coked-up goldfish.

Apple cares about your privacy though. Every fanboy simp always says it, so it's definitely true.

And apparently it is so entrenched now that even the review sites/researchers/etc. don't bother doing research into what data Apple harvests anymore. They just believe them implicitly. There are services on all their platforms like mediaanalysisd that scan files and categorize into categories like "human, pet, good photo, bad photo, drivers license, badge, social security number" and they even have the capability to analyze video and "auto-caption" the video, they claim it's an accessibility feature. It is also a great metadata generation and harvesting tool for all media on the device, and trivial for the contents of that metadata to be spirited away to Apple or elsewhere.
Classification excerpt from that process in particular:

meme_document_check_or_checkbook meme_curation_meme meme_curation_screenshot meme_document_boarding_pass meme_document_currency_or_bill meme_document_driving_license meme_document_office_badge meme_document_passport meme_document_receipt meme_document_social_security_number
- Doesn't surprise me. "Better than Google" = "never question again"
No one cares about our privacy. Even us.

The small price they have to pay to get NLRB complaints dropped and favorable tariff treatment, apparently.

It is astounding the rate at which companies and institutions are knuckling under. It hasn’t even been a whole year yet.

Bill Burr approved.