I am a time-traveling dolphin. An entity made of giant balls gave me the ability to breathe underwater, but this ability was recently stolen from me by aliens.
Sometimes I turn into a bird.
Tbh I’m not even sure the app is breaking any laws at all. Reporting on the presence of law enforcement is (not always but sometimes) protected speech here. I don’t use the app, and I haven’t heard that they are trying to arrest anyone in regards to it.
Honestly though… Have you thought through everything you’re saying? Sheltering Jewish people during the holocaust was illegal in Germany.
Anyway, have a nice day, those are my thoughts.
I don’t want to drag this conversation into American politics, but I will say ICE has been doing things against USA law. Things are not great here. Even noncitizens have rights that need to be respected, and ICE is failing to do that. They have also arrested lawful residents, citizens too, in their sweeps.
The ICE tracker app is a protest app/ direct action sort of thing, not a tool for criminality. Surely you can see the value of being able to use technology to resist a tyrannical government?
By the way, do you want the USA government to potentially control which software can be installed on your phone? Google is an American company. USA courts could decide (international company) is violating (American IP law or something else) and instruct Google to disallow their app from being installed entirely.
They can pull apps off the app store now, and they do that, but currently you can still side load stuff.
I think that other guy’s comment about the ICE tracker app really highlights the most important problem: If only signed apps can run, governments can pressure companies to remove access to certain apps. Even if Google allowed posting the app, the author would have to de-anonymize himself, and Google would have to comply with the law if they were subpoenaed. They would definitely give up the author’s name. It is an issue of freedom, freedom of speech, freedom to do with your device what you choose to do with it. You might not have a use for it (right now) but it’s not necessarily something you’d want to give up.
And, honestly, I would personally be affected by this, eventually. I use an app called NewPipe to watch youtube. It already isn’t available on the app store (violates google’s ToS), and I doubt they’d let people install this even if the author properly identified themselves, because I use it to avoid watching adds and to be able to “subscribe” to channels without an account. I could just borrow my husband’s premium subscription, I guess, but I really only use NewPipe to watch certain things, and it lacks the algorithmically driven feed (which I am actively avoiding, Google tends to suggest things that make you angry for clicks).
As a user, you should be upset that a private company is controlling how you are allowed to use your device that you paid for with your money.
This would be like if Microsoft decided you could only run Microsoft-approved code on a computer you purchased, in some cases with a locked bootloader so you can’t even change your OS.
Also, Google is (imho) already operating unethically when it comes to the app store (See Google v. Epic). I don’t care about Fortnite, but Google really shouldn’t be able to take a cut of random services just because it’s running on Android.
He named his technology company after a wizard pondering orb wiretapped by LOTR-satan.
Im sure theres some great jokes here but I don’t have anything snarky to say about it, I’m just tired.