Apple Made ICE Agents a Protected Class

Summary

Apple CEO Tim Cook meets with House Speaker Mike Johnson, an anti-migrant hardliner, at Donald Trump’s second inaugural on January 26 (Source: Speaker Johnson’s Instagram) WASHINGTON — Apple has quietly removed DeICER, a civic-reporting app used to log immigration enforcement activity, from its App Store after a law enforcement complaint — invoking a rule normally reserved for protecting marginalized groups from hate speech.MIGRANT INSIDER is sponsored byClick here to get startedAccording to internal correspondence reviewed by Migrant Insider, Apple told developer Rafael Concepcion that the app violated Guideline 1.1.1, which prohibits “defamatory, discriminatory, or mean-spirited content” directed at “religion, race, sexual orientation, gender, national/ethnic origin, or other targeted groups.”But Apple’s justification went further. “Information provided to Apple by law enforcement shows that your app violates Guideline 1.1.1 because its purpose is to provide location information about law enforcement officers that can be used to harm such officers individually or as a group,” the company wrote in its removal notice.The decision effectively treats federal immigration agents as a protected class — a novel interpretation of Apple’s hate-speech policy that shields one of the most powerful arms of government from public scrutiny.In an exclusive Tuesday-night interview, Concepcion — a former professor of journalism at Syracuse University — said the app had roughly 30,000 users before it disappeared from the App Store this week.He launched DeICER in February, initially as a “know your rights” app, before layering a map function that allowed users to log sightings of immigration enforcement activity.“It isn’t meant to harvest people,” Concepcion said. “It is meant to inform people.”The app’s design was deliberately minimalist and privacy-focused. DeICER was token-based and collected no personally identifiable data “in case DHS came to raid the technology for usable data,”...