Soo.. The Norwegian Directorate for Civil Protection (@DSB_no) has let the private company #Flexilarm develop an app for alerting the population when there's a civil defense siren. Another closed source app tracking the population..?
Thread.
Thread.
You can read more about the app in @tek_no's article tek.no/nyheter/nyhet/… . It's available on Play Store at play.google.com/store/apps/det… and App Store at apps.apple.com/no/app/flexila… .
The first thing that I noticed is the link to the privacy policy... which is broken... (it looks like they should have linked to .com and .no, but even there I couldn't find the policy). Hopefully @DSB_no can notify them.
The list of permissions is pretty hefty, so let's hope this app is safe. I hope someone can look into it. Of course it needs access to your location, but draw over other apps and read and write to the external storage..? 🤔
For some reason it's 25 MB big. It seems to be packed with unnecessary libs. But maybe that's what you get with React Native..? The performance is very sluggish and of course it doesn't feel native at all.
If you want to make your own app and not trust this, it looks like you can just tap into the URL containing the alerts. That's cool. The good news here is that in theory you wouldn't have to send your location to anyone to know if there's an alarm in your area.
But I do wonder why they have this code in here.. sending the latitude and longitude..? 🤔 Let's hope that privacy policy is available soon.
I think it would be very interesting to know why we can't use some sort of cell broadcast (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_Broa… ) for this instead of using an app like this.
At least I hope this can be a good tool for people with hearing impairment. And that we'll only get test alerts from it. 🚨👂📱
It turns out @DSB_no isn't as involved in this as it as the news articles etc makes it sound:
