Official site: https://www.iceblock.app/
The CNN article talks a bit more about privacy issues. This bit caught my eye:
It’s only available on iOS because Aaron says the app would have to collect information that could ultimately put users at risk to provide the same experience on Android.
I would like to see some details about this. Perhaps there’s a way to work around that problem, even if it meant publishing on F-Droid instead of Google Play.
remember when these guys couldn’t breathe while wearing a mask during lockdown?
edit: “e”
Breath - rhymes with ‘death’, and is what comes out of your mouth
Breathe - the action of breathing
Try to remember it this way: when you add the ‘e’ on the end, you’re really breeeething.
i just can’t type worth shit on a touch screen
Hey, no judgement here.
Without open source, it could be a honey pot.
I did check to see what permissions and data it wants access to. None. That seems like a good sign.
A nefarious app might also want permissions to see all your contacts.
Edit to clarify: The app install page says only “Data Not Collected”. I would presume they would list IP and/or location if that were amongst the data collected as I have seen other apps do, but I am certainly no expert. The dev is All U Chart, Inc.
Don’t apps self-report this stuff? You presumably need to make a DB query from their backend to see any reportings in a 5mi radius, so at minimum they have your GPS coordinates and IP address (which when combined would uniquely identify you)
Iirc, permissions for iOS are required for devs to be able to use the functions/methods under those permissions.
So if the app doesn’t use them, they won’t show up as needing them.
That may be true for things like contacts, but here they have your location, and they use the network. Thus they could hoover that up and store it, even mapping everywhere you go over time in their DB.
“Apple keeps most of your location history on your device: the bits of information stored in the cloud are either end-to-end encrypted, meaning only you can decipher them, or anonymized. As such, the risk of having your location history compromised by a data breach, or by a request from law enforcement to Apple for this data, is greatly reduced.”
In this case they are anonymized. The service can tell what device is where but not what user that deviceID matches and those identifiers are rotated to make it harder to match that data up.
That’s for Apple services specifically. If I build an iOS app, I can get geo coordinates.
But if the user doesn’t create an account and the deviceID rotates frequently, is there any way to tie those coordinates at a specific time to a specific person in a large enough geographical area and provide notifications (also provided via on device only services)? That’s what it seems like the developer has said Apple facilitates better.
The also said they will have a more detailed post up July 2nd about android on their site.
Sightings are tiny and compressible you could download all the sightings then diffs and never leak anything but ip or if a VPN not even that.
that mainly applies to trackers and analytics. the company still makes backend calls to its own servers and can do whatever it wants there with the location data it collects from you
TechCrunch did a traffic analysis: https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/01/iceblock-an-app-for-anonymously-reporting-ice-sightings-goes-viral-overnight-after-bondi-criticism/
the fact that i cannot use the app at all if i deny location permissions is a red flag. there’s no reason not to have a read only mode.
there may be no trackers as the other commenter mentioned about the TechCrunch analysis, but who is this random company that owns it: ALL U Chart, Inc. They’re likely pinging back their own servers with your coords
Fake your GPS and put it inside Republican homes
Can you do that on iOS?
you can using xcode and a manual gpx file
Easily? No. You could run an android emulator on desktop though.
Looks like honey to me
Good stuff, but IOS only at the moment.
Edit to include link: https://www.iceblock.app/
Only for iOS… Oof.
At this point my understanding from other sources is that they can’t distribute via the android App Store in a way that uses location tracking and notifications but is still anonymous where they can with iOS because location services is device side only.
Android Location manager can get the location without Google Services and there are alternative notification services like ntfy.
EDIT: The location manager is part of the official API and ntfy is available on the play store, so apps using them will also be allowed. Besides, it’s android, you can install alternative app stores or install apps directly. Maybe it’s a good time to teach vulnerable communities how to do it safely, because using Big Tech services is not safe for them.
Fused Location Provider data sent to Google is anonymized with a temporary device id anyway. They also can’t tell if you needed location for this, maps, or Pokémon Go. But they do sometimes collect GPS, WiFi, and cell data. Not using it is more private but I don’t think it’s worth worrying about.
Nice masks. Must feel like they’re doing something wrong.
I love how, even when they’re using them to hide their face, half of them still don’t know how to use a mask and put it under their nose
Yeah way to advertise that you’re a mouth-breather, right?
I thought they were talking about banning masks?
If a person is armed and masked and does not identify itself, it is most likely a terrorist and a threat to the public.
I’m surprised how non of them were gunned down on self defense,
I think they have been. But they’re not reporting it to avoid copycats.
There was a large number of police shootings in my state when one guy opened fire on a state trooper. Then we were hearing stories every week.
So I’m supposed to believe groups of people with masks running up to folks and grabbing them haven’t been getting retaliation back?
Saw some video clip from “ice” getting beat tf up in a Haitian community. No guns on the civ side, but they were charging and tackling " ice" and not letting any of their people get kidnapped. love to see it.
It probably helps that they are targeting decent, normal working immigrants, who are unlikely to be armed.
If they were actually going after armed gang members, they probably would be getting shot. But as we can tell by the fact they are hiding their faces, they are chicken shit losers cosplaying as tough guys targeting defenseless people because it’s easier.
Crime statistics plainly show that the immigrant community is objectively one of the least likely groups to commit any crime, let alone violent crimes.
The vast majority of immigrants fear any interaction with police that could jeopardize their path to citizenship, even before trump took office and made everything way worse. These people just want to work and go home to their families. They’re unfortunately a perfect target for fascists like Trump because they are under represented, decent people who aren’t likely to fight back at first. Remember that fascism requires a nebulous “enemy” to rally people towards. You need a group that is simultaneously “evil” and capable of great harm to the government and people, but also easily handled by “security” measures. This allows the dictator to convince the public that all these sweeping powers that are being demanded are for their own safety. And unfortunately the vast majority of people just believe the first thing they hear, and we end up in this situation.
I’m just waiting for a trial where a jury has to decide if shooting at a gang of masked unidentified men in unmarked vehicles kidnapping you or your loves ones counts as self defense.
and regardless of the verdict the supreme court will uphold the right of the state to let unidentified gangs kidnap people off the streets.
I agree with every part of this except for the word “most likely,” since the incidence of ICE arrests are extremely high right now but terrorism is otherwise not.
The ICE kidnappings are terrorism.
Did you not notice I said “otherwise”?
Regardless, terrorist is a subjective term, and typically one excludes agencies with jurisdiction or organized militia; so the police, ICE, U.S. military, IDF, etc. don’t qualify regardless of your disposition toward them. This is why newspapers are usually quite hesitant to use the word “terrorist.” There’s a good case for calling the CIA (and other foreign-intelligence TLAs) terrorists though, since they operate outside of places where they have the authority to do so. Obviously, it’s semantics at the end of the day.
Why can’t it just be a website? Why does everything have to be a fucking “app”?
What a good country we live in when this app is the #1 app in the Social Networking category.
Would it be possible to create a webapp version of this? With ICE and CBP freely able to search phones now, I am worried about retaliation if they find this app on the phone.
There’s a page “People Over Papers” or something along those lines. A linktree has the current working URL that I don’t have on hand at the moment
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Regarding the Android version:
https://www.iceblock.app/android
TL,DR: “It’s difficult, so we’ll hide behind privacy excuses rather than helping the largest number of at-risk people.”
Seriously, if VPN companies and every other company that handles sensitive data anonymously can do it, so can these developers. When 70% of the worldwide smartphone user base uses Android, an iOS-only app is just not good enough anymore.
I think their argument is sounding.
Offering VPN is different from storing private information like a device ID. You don’t get notifications from your VPN.
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I think you aren’t that familiar with android. Android’s main purpose is to collect as much information on you as possible. Google did not offer it up out of the goodness of their heart. It’s integral to their data collection and resale business model.
You act like Apple doesn’t collect an absolute massive amount of data on every one of their devices and users. Sure it’s done In a more clandestine way than Google but they still do.
With Google I can run a security focused ROM like GrapheneOS and have virtually no data collection on my device, while with apple black boxes you will enjoy the illusion of data privacy and be happy about it.
I know installing custom ROMs is not standard user behaviour and I will concede that in many instances apple is better than stock android for privacy /security, but the way you framed your argument erked me because you cant say or prove anything with their closed source black boxes. Apple aren’t good people, they are anti consumer and exist to make money. Of course they collect data.
“If it’s a legitimate disappearing, the public has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.”
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Why not just release it as a self install not connected to an appstore?
Not disagreeing. The issues that come with it:
1 - Not many people will install it because you have to disable default security features. Android gives a huge “Your device is insecure” scary message.
2 - Then you’ll get the people who will use this for malicious reasons. Even the app store gets copycats that do nothing but steal information.
Regarding (1), it still gets the network effect because of iOS users. That it’s harder for android users to install does not mean the marginal utility of an android user installing the app is lower than that of an iOS user installing the app.
If the goal is to get this in the hands of as many people as possible to fight I.C.E. should it not be in as many forms as possible?
Yeah. They literally relying on ios walled garden.
Super skeptical that this is a Honeypot, or they’d just make it a web app.
A honeypot in a walled garden? What has this nation become?
Yeah that doesn’t make sense to me. They could easily release it on fdroid and through a website where you can download the apk.
