Legal experts condemn Apple bowing to White House's request to remove ICE tracking app
Source: NPR
October 3, 2025 7:34 PM ET
Apple and Google on Thursday removed apps that alert people when Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents are nearby following pressure from Attorney General Pam Bondi. Critics of the tech giants capitulating to the Trump administration say it shows the sway President Trump has over Silicon Valley in his second term.
Apple said it yanked an app called ICEBlock from its app store after the "safety risks" of the app were made known to the company. The anonymous, crowd-sourced app describes itself as "Waze but for ICE sightings," and claims to serve as an early warning system informing people when ICE agents are nearby.
The app was launched in April and garnered hundreds of thousands of downloads, but it was only after Attorney General Pam Bondi put Apple on notice, demanding the app be pulled from the App Store, that the company made it unavailable. "We reached out to Apple today demanding they remove the ICEBlock app from their App Store — and Apple did so," said Bondi in a statement to Fox News.
The Justice Department did not respond to NPR's questions about its request.
Read more: https://www.npr.org/2025/10/03/nx-s1-5561999/apple-google-iceblock-app-removal
= new reply since forum marked as read
and that was before any "apps" like Waze. The "crowd sourcing" of the past used to be CB-Radio!
Of course the peak of the sunspots impacted use (11 year cycle), so back then they went in and out of "style".
There is a giganto case - Gonzalez v. Google
SCOTUS remanded that back to the 9th Circuit (2023) - https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/22pdf/21-1333_6j7a.pdf
but where you had this ruling for the related case that was decided Twitter v. Taamneh and as part of that -
By Amy Howe
on May 18, 2023
The Supreme Court on Thursday ruled against the family of a 2017 ISIS attack victim who sought to hold tech companies liable for allowing ISIS to use their platforms in its terrorism efforts. The lawsuit seeking to hold Twitter, Facebook, and Google liable for aiding and abetting international terrorism cannot go forward, a unanimous court found. And based on that decision, the justices sidestepped a major ruling in a separate case on the scope of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, which generally shields tech companies from liability for content published by users. The justices sent that case, Gonzalez v. Google LLC, back to the lower court for another look – suggesting that it too was unlikely to survive.
(snip)
That "Section 230" is what is the "liability" (and lack thereof) part and Apple would not have had any liability for what might have happened with that ICE app, but they were "pressured".
(you made me go right down the rabbit hole and I remember when those cases came through too
)
