Saturday, April 2, 2011

State Department Builds A Panic Button App

Sorry I haven't blogged lately, I had to take care of some personal things.


Anyway, imagine you are a pro-democracy protester on the streets of a repressive government. You’ve got your cellphone and you are messaging your friends. In the crowd near you, the police start making arrests. Fearing the government will confiscate your phone and investigate your contacts, you push a “panic button” on your phone. It deletes the contacts in your address book and sends out an alert. Such an app wasn’t readily available so the U.S. State Department, acting as a venture capitalist, decided to build one.
The State Department tells TechCrunch government funded work is underway to build an Android version of this “panic button” app. No release date has been set. Another version designed to work on low-cost Nokia phones, more common in the developing world, is being considered. No iPhone app is planned for now.

Read more here

23 comments:

  1. thats a great idea considering the current situation in the middle east

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  2. This is a very interesting idea. Whenever they come out with one for the iPhone (which i'm sure will happen before too long), I'll probably get one.

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  3. Lol why would the government need that.........

    /sarcasm

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  4. Ya know the government is so good at running things.

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  5. ....well this will make Cops a lot more interesting. Haha.

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  6. Maybe it sends all your contacts to another secret database. Who knows

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  7. It would really be more useful if the application also included the functionality to back up your data on a computer beforehand for easy recovery if it's a false alarm.

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  8. Interest and it really would not be too difficult to create an app like this.

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  9. interesting idea, though why would the state department create that?

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  10. Hmmm, this is unique, not sure if id need it though

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  11. Great blog style! Keep this up! Good blogger!

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  12. Interesting but couldn't the data be recovered anyways

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  13. What will they think of next...

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  14. sounds like a fail button lol.

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  15. I like the idea!
    Cheers and following!

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  16. If the functionality was that you press the button and get a robot voice yelling "Alert" with flashing images on the screen I'd buy it for 59 pennies. I would have no interest in such an app that deletes my contact history, do they have any idea how long it takes to put the contacts back on the phone!

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