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0 pointsskrebbel5y ago0 comments

I once did a project with the Dutch Police and this care about privacy definitely did exist.

For example, they have an app (literally "The Police App") that you can install if you want notifications from police reports in your area. Think missing persons reports, wrong-way riders, etc. Now, they could simply make a database of every app user and track their location in it to know who to send a push notification. But, even though the app requires no signup, they decided that this was too privacy-invading and they had no business tracking people's whereabouts. So for each notification, even if it was only relevant to a tiny low population town in the middle of nowhere, they'd send a push notification including some geofence data to every single app user, and then the app would locally compare that data to the current location and simply block the notification from appearing if it was outside the target region.

That's wasteful and messy, but it was very privacy conscious. I was pretty impressed.

So no, plenty government agencies care a lot about this stuff.

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dr_dshiv5y ago

That's a really interesting example. What would have been the public response if they had done something less conscious?

I'm always curious about how dutch governance works so well!

skrebbelOP5y ago

I doubt the public would've noticed.

The Police App isn't that widely used, and there's no obvious way to find out that it's not sending your location to a central server - after all, you still need to give the app permission to read your location!

I think if they had put in a database and gone on some blarb about how the app is entirely anonymous (it is) and the location database is well secured, nobody except a few privacy extremists (akin to the author of the blog post linked here) would've thought twice about it.

They didn't do it out of fear of repercussions but because they took both the actual rules about police-citizen-privacy, and the spirit behind those rules, very seriously.

Note, though, that this app was made by the media and PR department of the police. They didn't have much to lose by respecting privacy, except maybe spending some more tax euros. There's other government agencies that don't share this attitude (eg our intelligence agency, who thinks everybody is a potential terrorist and deserves to be treated as such), and I wouldn't be surprised if even other branches of the police itself wouldn't take that whole privacy shizzle so seriously. Eg the ones occupied with catching bad guys. It's not all roses and sunshine.

But it's still pretty nice.

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