Fedware: Government apps that spy harder than the apps they ban

>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.

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")

The closing point is the one that should get more attention — every single one of these apps could be replaced by a web page. And from a product standpoint, there's really only one reason to ship a native app when your content is just press releases and weather alerts: you want access to APIs the browser won't give you. Background location, biometrics, device identity, boot triggers — none of that is available through a browser, and that's by, unfortunately, design.

Do these posts just get upvoted due to the graphics/animations? I find this site incredibly difficult to read with things re-playing as you scroll up and down and the articles I've read from here are often light on details. The graphics seem very AI-generated (overlapping text and other little issues) which makes me think the whole thing is from an LLM.

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.

Relatedly, I just registered for PACER to download court documents. It's pretty shocking that to get public legal documents the US Federal Court system requires full name, birthdate, address, phone, email, credit card info... and I THINK (it's past the initial registration page so can't confirm 100%) also mother's maiden name and 2 common security questions. Just a treasure-trove of PII if it ever falls into the wrong hands. (What's esp frustrating is even after going through this, I had to call a number and wait on hold for 1 hour to activate the account.)

I'm old enough to remember when people actually took the Hatch Act seriously.

You could not pay me to use any of these apps. All of my own devices run some form of Linux (Debian for servers, Arch for desktop/laptop, GrapheneOS on phone). I generally refuse to use non-free software, the main exception being Steam on a dedicated gaming rig.

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.

The names of the offending apps on the cards need much more emphasis.

Why is every part of this website animated, and part of the text is backwards? Am I the only one who sees it this way?

There is currently an attempt going on by several governments to crack down harder against the people. While before it was "only", say, California and their age-sniffing laws infiltrating and tainting Linux - thus declaring war against the people, as revealed by Meta acting as primary lobbyist here - today I read that now that age-sniffing was also approved in some european countries (in one EU country the parents are required to install a sniffing app and thus verify the age of the kids; I think it was in Greece. I'd never help any government act as fascist sniffing proxy trying to control and monitor by kids, that is an act of betrayal of such a government), their next line of attack is against VPN. Suddenly the picture shifts, because if VPNs are targeted, how does finding an excuse such as "but but but think about the kids", make any sense? That is very clearly governments becoming increasingly fascist. Add a few lobbyists here and there who benefit financially from this and now we suddenly understand how democracies are undermined. See also:

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.

The names of the offending apps on the cards need much more emphasis.

> And from a product standpoint, there's really only one reason to ship a native app

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.

> there's really only one reason to ship a native app when your content is just press releases and weather alerts

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.

Today morning, I was checking TSA wait times. Guess what, they want you to install their app to get the wait time. [1]

[1](https://www.dhs.gov/check-wait-times)

Exactly what big businesses do, and governments think what businesses do is good practice. Fore everyone to use an app.

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?

> access to APIs

It's mostly static data. Just publish it under a URL that won't change. Then we could actually cache and archive it.

> Background location, biometrics, device identity, boot triggers — none of that is available through a browser

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/

I'm old enough to remember when people actually took the Hatch Act seriously.

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.

Apps cannot gather data, and there are lots of things that requires apps now.

>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.

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")

They've pivoted to good news. It's more absurd.

https://theonion.com/breaking-all-of-world-s-problems-solved...

It's ming boggling just how....cringe... these billionaires that want to run the world are. Makes you wonder if the personas that seek billions are correlated strongly with mental illnesses.

Why is every part of this website animated, and part of the text is backwards? Am I the only one who sees it this way?

I think they are supposed to be like cards that flip over and you see what's on the back.

If the webmaster notices this, the squares aren't great on mobile.

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.

> Do these posts just get upvoted due to the graphics/animations?

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's upvoted because the message is "the administration bad." Which, heuristically, is the correct take most of the time.

I didn't even realise it was an article. I thought the grid thing at the top was just an index page linking out to other pages.

I can't read any of it, but the other comment's descriptions sound like the new mandatory Russian Max app, so it isn't without precedent.

Speaking for myself unless I know the site and like how they do things, my default these days is a reader view.

It helps a lot!

In this case it helped me lose interest in the article within about 20 seconds.