I really don't understand why everything has to be an "app." My phone only has a handful of apps, including two web browsers, through which other things are accessed. No app gets access to location, sensors, the camera, or the microphone.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qatar_corruption_scandal_at_th...
Democracy needs to be adjusted - right now private interests can too easily sabotage and undermine it.
when is the onion going to go bankrupt? it has to be soon, i imagine. no way it can compete with reality at this point.
(the rest of the article is a bit too depressing for me to comment on at the moment, other than saying "wow, gross")
While this post does have some interesting information, I have to wade through distracting animations that seem "off" which makes me questions all of it.
The flip side is there are (presumably) real people downloading these apps. Maybe it’s a kid interested in a career in the FBI, or the family of someone who works there. Idk. (I thought it would contain a secure tip line or something, but the app seems to be a social-media front end first.)
I am willing to entertain that there is a legitimate reason for an app to exist without conceding that it should be a pile of trash.
The UK's Companies House (required for anyone who is a director or has a shareholding of more than 15% etc.) requires a Onegov ID now. They offer a web version with a scan of a photo ID (passport or driving license). I tried it. I thought one of those would work. Apparently the web version needs to ask security questions (reasonable, as the app used NFC to read your passport) but despite the vast amount of information the government has on me (to issue those IDs, to collect taxes, etc) it cannot do that, so i had to either use the app or go in person to a post office in a different town.
Similarly I got an email from Occado saying that if I used the app I could change orders without checking out again. If I do it on the website i have to checkout again. Why?
I have worked on several applications where the product managers wanted to make our web app something that could be installed through the app store, because that's how users expect to get apps.
I know people who don't even type search queries or URLs into a browser, they just tell the phone what they want to find and open whatever shows up in a search result.
I've tried pushing back against the native app argument and won once because customers actually reported liking that we had a website instead of an app, and other times because deploying an app through the stores was more work than anyone had time to take on. Otherwise, we would've been deploying through app stores for sure.
Marketing gets plenty of data from google analytics or whatever platform they're using anyway, so neither they nor product managers actually care about the data from native APIs.
https://theonion.com/breaking-all-of-world-s-problems-solved...
I don't think so. It's more likely that they're upvoted as a signal-boost; convene here to talk about bad government tech.
Some submissions are less about the subject matter than they are about providing a space to talk about only the subject in general. I've found this to be the case when the content is AI-generated.
It helps a lot!
In this case it helped me lose interest in the article within about 20 seconds.
I don't know exactly what you are talking about here, but if I wanted to find a restaurant that is local I definitely just type 'Miguels' into the browser and then it searches google for 'Miguels' automatically and it know's my location so the first result is going to be their website and phone number and I can load the website for the menu or just call if I know what my family wants.
However even then, I'd rather have an app for them where I can enter in the items I want to order. I've noticed apps tend to be more responsive. Maybe it's just the coding paradigm that the applications tend to load all of the content already and the actions I take in the app are just changing what is displayed, but on a website they make every 'action' trigger an API call that requires a response before it moves on to the next page? This makes a big difference when my connection isn't great.
I also find it easier to swap between active apps instead of between tabs of a browser. If I want to check on the status of the order or whatnot, it's easier to swap to the app and have that refresh then it is to click the 'tab' button of the browser and find the correct tab the order was placed in.
"Sources went on to report that, due a minor oversight that also occurred as you slumbered, your student loans must still be repaid in full and are now subject to a highly predatory ballooning interest rate."
This second effect happens in all kinds of places where you have to jumps througha lot of hoops to just get to get there. Every hoop discards candidates, and promotes different things. Sometimes in ways that make sure that nobody capable of attaining the job is fit to actually do it well. You can see the issue all over the place, once you track people's careers. Sometimes things that should be disqualifying for a role are actually requirements in practice.
It's mostly static data. Just publish it under a URL that won't change. Then we could actually cache and archive it.
Most browsers do in fact offer that level of granularity, especially for PWA usecases [0].
And from an indicators perspective, having certain capabilities turned off can make it easier to identify and de-anonymize individuals.
[0] - https://pwascore.com/
Money does not make you a good or bad person. It just makes you more of who you are already.
As for things "requiring" apps, I am happy to do without those. If I cannot access something through a website on a device under my control, I will not use it. No convenience is worth more than my freedom and privacy.
Nobody has the guts to boycott them anymore. Billionaires know that you depend on them for news, social media and smartphones too.
There's a considerable difference. And doing whatever one can to mitigate the former shouldn't be discouraged by falsely equivocating the latter.
This is just human nature.
People who are at wealth level x tend to say, "I can't believe that people at wealth level x+1 aren't more generous!" all the while ignoring their own lack of desire to give generously to people at wealth levels x-1 and below.
Good news is that you would sleep fine at night. No matter how destructive your existence was, and how much of a net negative you were to the world, you would still think very highly of yourself.
Which is why he's playing a shell game with xAI "buying" twitter and then SpaceX "buying" xAI
The White House app ships with a sanctioned Chinese tracking SDK, the FBI app serves ads, and FEMA wants 28 permissions to show you weather alerts.
28 Mar 2026 — 30 min read

The federal government released an app yesterday, March 27th, and it's spyware.
Listen to this article
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The White House app markets itself as a way to get "unparalleled access" to the Trump administration, with press releases, livestreams, and policy updates. The kind of content that every RSS feed on the planet delivers with one permission: network access. But the White House app, version 47.0.1 (because subtlety died a long time ago), requests precise GPS location, biometric fingerprint access, storage modification, the ability to run at startup, draw over other apps, view your Wi-Fi connections, and read badge notifications. It also ships with 3 embedded trackers including Huawei Mobile Services Core (yes, the Chinese company the US government sanctioned, shipping tracking infrastructure inside the sitting president's official app), and it has an ICE tip line button that redirects straight to ICE's reporting page.
This thing also has a "Text the President" button that auto-fills your message with "Greatest President Ever!" and then collects your name and phone number. There's no specific privacy policy for the app, just a generic whitehouse.gov policy that doesn't address any of the app's tracking capabilities.
The White House app might actually be one of the milder ones. I've been going through every federal agency app I can find on Google Play, pulling their permissions from Exodus Privacy (which audits Android APKs for trackers and permissions), and what I found deserves its own term. I'm calling it Fedware.
Ok so let me walk you through what the federal government is running on your phone.
The FBI's app, myFBI Dashboard, requests 12 permissions including storage modification, Wi-Fi scanning, account discovery (it can see what accounts are on your device), phone state reading, and auto-start at boot. It also contains 4 trackers, one of which is Google AdMob, which means the FBI's official app ships with an ad-serving SDK while also reading your phone identity. From what I found, the FBI's news app has more trackers embedded than most weather apps.
The FEMA app requests 28 permissions including precise and approximate location, and has gone from 4 trackers in older versions down to 1 in v3.0.14. Twenty-eight permissions for an app whose primary function is showing you weather alerts and shelter locations. To put that in context, the AP News app delivers the same kind of disaster coverage with a fraction of the permissions.
IRS2Go has 3 trackers and 10 permissions in its latest version, and according to a TIGTA audit, the IRS released this app to the public before the required Privacy Impact Assessment was even signed, which violated OMB Circular A-130. The app shares device IDs, app activity, and crash logs with third parties, and TIGTA found that the IRS never confirmed that filing status and refund amounts were masked and encrypted in the app interface.
Federal Government Apps
FEMA
0
1
White House
0
3
CBP Passport
0
0
myFBI Dashboard
0
4
IRS2Go
0
3
MyTSA
0
1
Civilian News / RSS Apps
Feedly
0
0
AP News
0
2
MyTSA comes in lighter with 9 permissions and 1 tracker, but still requests precise and approximate location. The TSA's own Privacy Impact Assessment says the app stores location locally and claims it never transmits GPS data to TSA. I'll give them credit for documenting that, because most of these apps have privacy policies that read like ransom notes.
CBP Mobile Passport Control is where things get genuinely alarming. This one requests 14 permissions including 7 classified as "dangerous": background location tracking (it follows you even when the app is closed), camera access, biometric authentication, and full external storage read/write. And the whole CBP ecosystem, from CBP One to CBP Home to Mobile Passport Control, feeds data into a network that retains your faceprints for up to 75 years and shares it across DHS, ICE, and the FBI.
The government also built a facial recognition app called Mobile Fortify that ICE agents carry in the field. It draws from hundreds of millions of images across DHS, FBI, and State Department databases. ICE Homeland Security Investigations signed a $9.2 million contract with Clearview AI in September 2025, giving agents access to over 50 billion facial images scraped from the internet. DHS's own internal documents admit Mobile Fortify can be used to amass biographical information of "individuals regardless of citizenship or immigration status", and CBP confirmed it will "retain all photographs" including those of U.S. citizens, for 15 years.
Photos submitted through CBP Home, biometric scans from Mobile Passport Control, and faces captured by Mobile Fortify all feed this system. And the EFF found that ICE does not allow people to opt out of being scanned, and agents can use a facial recognition match to determine your immigration status even when other evidence contradicts it. A U.S.-born citizen was told he could be deported based on a biometric match alone.
SmartLINK is the ICE electronic monitoring app, built by BI Incorporated, a subsidiary of the GEO Group (a private prison company that profits directly from how many people ICE monitors), under a $2.2 billion contract. The app collects geolocation, facial images, voice prints, medical information including pregnancy data, and phone numbers of your contacts. ICE's contract gives them "unlimited rights to use, dispose of, or disclose" all data collected. The app's former terms of service allowed sharing "virtually any information collected through the application, even beyond the scope of the monitoring plan." SmartLINK went from 6,000 users in 2019 to over 230,000 by 2022, and in 2019, ICE used GPS data from these monitors to coordinate one of the largest immigration raids in history, arresting around 700 people across six cities in Mississippi.
And if you think your location data is safe because you use regular apps and avoid government ones, the federal government is buying that data too. Companies like Venntel collect 15 billion location points from over 250 million devices every day through SDKs embedded in over 80,000 apps (weather, navigation, coupons, games). DHS, FBI, DOD, and the DEA purchase this data without warrants, creating a constitutional loophole around the Supreme Court's 2018 Carpenter v. United States ruling that requires a warrant for cellphone location history. The Defense Department even purchased location data from prayer apps to monitor Muslim communities. Police departments used similar data to track racial justice protesters.
And then there's the IRS-ICE data sharing deal from April 2025. The IRS and ICE signed a Memorandum of Understanding allowing ICE to receive names, addresses, and tax data for people with removal orders. ICE submitted 1.28 million names. The IRS erroneously shared the data of thousands of people who should never have been included. The acting IRS Commissioner, Melanie Krause, resigned in protest. The chief privacy officer quit. One person leaving changes nothing about the institution, and the data was already out the door. A federal judge blocked further sharing in November 2025, ruling it likely violates IRS confidentiality protections, but by then the IRS was already building an automated system to give ICE bulk access to home addresses with minimal human oversight. The court order is a speed bump, and they'll find another route.
The apps, the databases, and the data broker contracts all feed the same pipeline, and no single agency controls it because they all share it.
Data Source
Processing
Enforcement
The GAO reported in 2023 that nearly 60% of 236 privacy and security recommendations issued since 2010 had still not been implemented. Congress has been told twice, in 2013 and 2019, to pass comprehensive internet privacy legislation. It has done neither. And it won't, because the surveillance apparatus serves the people who run it, and the people who run it write the laws. Oversight is theater. The GAO issues a report, Congress holds a hearing, everyone performs concern for the cameras, and then the contracts get renewed and the data keeps flowing. It's working exactly as designed.
The federal government publishes content available through standard web protocols and RSS feeds, then wraps that content in applications that demand access to your location, biometrics, storage, contacts, and device identity. They embed advertising trackers in FBI apps. They sell the line that you need their app to receive their propaganda while the app quietly collects data that flows into the same surveillance pipeline feeding ICE raids and warrantless location tracking. Every single one of these apps could be replaced by a web page, and they know that. The app exists because a web page can't read your fingerprint, track your GPS in the background, or inventory the other accounts on your device.
You don't need their app. You don't need their permission to access public information. You already have a browser, an RSS reader, and the ability to decide for yourself what runs on your own hardware. Use them.
Progress 0/10 answered
Question 1
How many embedded trackers does the White House app contain?
0
1
3
7
Question 2
Which Chinese company's tracking SDK is embedded in the White House app?
Tencent
Huawei
ByteDance
Xiaomi
Question 3
Which FBI app tracker is used for serving targeted advertisements?
Google Firebase Analytics
Google AdMob
Facebook SDK
OneSignal
Question 4
How many permissions does the FEMA app request?
9
14
28
42
Question 5
How long does DHS retain faceprints collected through CBP apps?
5 years
15 years
Up to 75 years
Indefinitely
Question 6
How much is CBP's contract with Clearview AI worth?
$1.5 million
$9.2 million
$22 million
$2.2 billion
Question 7
How many location data points does Venntel collect per day?
500 million
3 billion
15 billion
100 billion
Question 8
What private prison company's subsidiary built SmartLINK for ICE?
CoreCivic
GEO Group
Palantir
Northrop Grumman
Question 9
What Supreme Court case ruled that warrants are required for cellphone location history?
Riley v. California
Carpenter v. United States
Katz v. United States
Smith v. Maryland
Question 10
What percentage of GAO privacy recommendations from 2010 onward have still not been implemented?
25%
40%
Nearly 60%
80%
0/10
Your Score
0
Correct
0
Incorrect
0
Unanswered
Do we have any actual evidence of this? I know plenty of exorbitantly wealthy people who aren’t hoarding anything, they just didn’t sell their piece of the closely-held business they started, and they spend their time skiing, reading, travelling and taking care of their friends and family.
to be fair, the original comment by malfist started with "makes you wonder", so i dont think they are asserting this as fact.
>I know plenty of exorbitantly wealthy people who aren’t hoarding anything,
some people would see this sentence as contradictory, and they would suggest that the thing those exorbitantly wealthy people are hoarding is money.
And I’d say they’re literally wrong. They may be hoarding capital. And yes, some wealthy people do hoard money per se. But outside the Epstein class there are lots of people we just don’t hear about because they aren’t on social media talking about how rich they are. Because while it’s fun to postulate that the rich have mental illnesses, it’s documented that social-media addiction causes them.
while this distinction may be important to you, i dont think it really changes anything about malfists question/point.
>Because while it’s fun to postulate that the rich have mental illnesses, it’s documented that social-media addiction causes them.
and cigarettes cause cancer. not sure what this has to do with the conversation, but yeah, social media is bad (smoking, too).
(please note: i am not arguing for or against what you or malfist have said, just thought there was a little something lost in translation re: you asking for evidence after a conversation that started with "makes you wonder")
Of course it does. Turning capital into spendable or transferable wealth takes work. Plenty of rich people are just enjoying their lives in the same way retirees do.
> not sure what this has to do with the conversation, but yeah, social media is bad
I’m saying the folks we tend to get upset about being rich at are also the rich who are prominently on social media. The problem isn’t that they’re rich. It’s that they’re on social media so much. I think there is a genuine argument to be made that even Elon Musk would have been a better-liked person, maybe even a better person, if he never got on Twitter.
> thought there was a little something lost in translation re: "makes you wonder"
Perhaps. And appreciate your clarifying for them. In 2026 I’m just sceptical of the “just asking questions” bit, particularly when it comes to cultural tropes.