Snarked one Second Amendment rights defender: “My name is Jorge Luis Juan Gonzaga, and I am an enforcer for Los Burros Muertes, a Mexican drug cartel based in Tijuana. Since the unfortunate events of last year when our largest firearms supplier Mr. Attorney General Eric Holder was investigated by the U.S. Congress regarding the joint business venture we had with his representatives from BATF, our supply of U.S.-made AK47 and AR15 rifles kind of dried up. You may have heard about this in the media under the name ‘Fast & Furious.’
“As you can imagine,” he continued, “we were desperately looking for an alternative source of firearms to replace the ones supplied until last year by Mr. Attorney General Holder. This is when I found this wonderful app. Now I can locate gringo gun owners and steal their guns. Muchas gracias!”
There’s a new app in the Android Marketplace, and it may be exposing the fact that you’re a gun owner to the entire world.
University of California San Diego lecturer Brett Stalbaum has released an app to the Android Marketplace which encourages users to mark, on a map, the location of “irresponsible gun owners.”
Yep, the app’s entire purpose is to document and map the personal addresses of people who own guns. The “irresponsible” part of that is completely at the discretion of the person making the posting.
Not sure how this is much different than an app that allows marking the location of citizens by their political affiliation, religious affiliation, or sexual orientation, but apparently because it involves guns, it’s OK.
According to the “marking guidelines” for the app
…unlocked, loaded or carelessly stored weapons should generally be treated with concern by friends, neighbors and visitors. The locations of such careless owners should probably be marked so that others can make an informed decision.
People who add their neighbor’s address to the app are protected by anonymity. So apparently you can exercise your First Amendment rights anonymously, but not your Second.
The maker of the app understands there are concerns in regards to the app, and they have opened up a phone line to take feedback from the general population. That number is (225) 267-7346. If you’d like to express your displeasure in the app, I’d encourage you to do so politely and clearly, indicating that the app is a gross invasion of privacy.
The app, called “Gun Geo Marker” is available in the Google Play App Store. You can visit the official Google Play page for the app here: https://play.google.com/...
In fairness, the description of the app has now changed, it reads:
What is the Gun Geo Marker? You want to read this first, just so you know what is going on. Don't be too disappointed once you have worked it out.
It is two things. First, it is a speculative design experiment "in the wild" that is to suss out what the parameters of a successful gun safety app might be. For example, the experiment showed that there is great potential for "local use only" mapping applications, or using GPS to constrain use of mapping interfaces only to the place in which one stands. This has applications for public data of a sensitive nature as it disallows arbitrary global browsing, keeping all information into its local context. Also, the ontology for marking dangerous guns owners feels like an excellent start. An aspect of the project which did not work – nor did I expect it to in this particular case – was the use of anonymous marking of sites. Simply stated, the project suffered numerous hacking attacks that filled the database with false info, not to mention that anti-gun-safety types have also used the app itself as a tool for mischief. It is both sad to see, but also something that I grudgingly admit I have a certain level of respect for as an electronic activist myself. The issues of hacking and intentionally false data might be solved by an organization with sufficient resources through using authentication and some type of verification regimen to ensure the data is of high quality.
Secondly, the App was a honeypot. As a gun owner myself, I am all too aware of a smaller component of the community that sees any attempt at improving gun safety as an affront to their second amendment rights. Reasonable regulations that do not interfere with anyone's second amendment rights – such as universal background checks and trigger locks when guns are unattended in the presence of children – are needed to help abate the gun violence epidemic in this country. But some places in the United States seem committed to going in the opposite direction, as in Florida where a law was passed preventing medical doctors from asking about gun safety in the home as they might about swimming pool safety. So, the project is also a culture-jamming exercise intended to draw out earnest expressions from the radical anti-gun-safety community, expressions that will now become part of a second phase of the project which involves aesthetic manifestations. The app itself will remain online for a time so that people can play with the user interface, after which it will morph into a purely "documentation" application about the project.
Brett Stalbaum
---- Original App Description, which really does these things ---
Geolocate Dangerous Guns and Owners with the Gun Geo Marker. Geolocation means marking dangerous sites on the App's map so that you and others can be aware of the risks in your neighborhood.
The Gun Geo Marker operates very simply, letting parents and community members mark, or geolocate, sites associated with potentially unsafe guns and gun owners. These locations are typically the homes or businesses of suspected unsafe gun owners, but might also be public lands or other locations where guns are not handled safely, or situations where proper rights to own or use any particular type of firearm may not exist. Electronically marking these locations can help others in the area learn about their geography of risk from gun accidents or violence. No matter what your safety concern with firearms might be, you should feel free to use this tool to provide the most accurate information you can such that others can make their own safety decisions.
As a crowd sourced information tool, the information about dangerous gun sites comes from users. Please follow us at http://www.gungeomarker.org, https://twitter.com/... and https://www.facebook.com/....
Our app rating is a source of pride. We encourage anyone to look at the reviews and determine for themselves: Is it the quality of app? Or is is what the app does?