Just like the app for spotting wildlife or spotting illegal fishing boats along our coast, some people created a satellite tracking app to locate migrants over in the Mediterranean.

It was supposed to be a feel good app, there to help the good people of the world prevent migrants drowning as they crossed the sea.

Called I Sea, it didn’t take technologists long to shred the “feel good bullshit”. From Gawker:

The app pretended to distribute satellite imagery to smartphone users so they can “flag” suspicious ships, in the hope that one of the users might spot boats full of refugees—as if an untrained eye can distinguish between a normal boat and a refugee boat.

Instead of sending each user a different piece of the Mediterranean Sea, it sent everyone the same image, along with weather from Libya to trick them into thinking this is somehow live, as the Daily Dot also pointed out.

iOS expert and developer Rosnya Keller also discovered that the image is an outdated map from Google Maps.

Matt Burke analyzed the application and confirmed that despite the fact that the app could request different imagery, it just loads the same image, one made on the 9th of June, and processed in Photoshop.

If you make any attempt to actually flag an object and set of coordinates as a boat in need of a rescue, the app demands your name, email, and even passport information, with no privacy policy in sight.

The app doesn’t validate these entries, so my “Fuck off” counted as a valid passport.

In response to this, Apple removed the app from iStore – but it really should have been done a long time ago. No one bothered to check it properly.

“I Sea” was developed by a Singapore-based Grey Digital advertising firm, in an apparent collaboration with Malta-based Migrant Offshore Aid Station (MOAS), though it’s unclear how much collaboration actually took place. The app was even nominated (and won an award) at the Cannes Lions international advertising awards show in France.

All that Grey Digital did in response to the take down is issue a non-apology saying, in between many things, that the app was “in testing mode.”

Grey Digital’s statement also doesn’t answer questions like “where do you get your data,” “where does this information go to,” and “how do you expect average people to be able to distinguish between regular ship traffic and migrant boats?”

[source: gawker]