Приложение для отслеживания рейдеров ICE набрало более 10 тысяч пользователей благодаря поддержке сообщества и СМИ

In March I posted here about AntiFreeze, the web app I built in my spare bedroom to alert people of ICE sightings in their area. At the time, 183 people had installed it. This evening it crossed 10,045 installs. I did not do it. Those 183 users came after an interview with Border Report, which ran across the Nexstar affiliate network and put the story on local news stations around the country. Real TV coverage, in a lot of markets. It produced 183 installs. I posted here on March 21st. Within a few days AntiFreeze had 3,100 users. By June 13th the number reached 4,000, still traced back to this post. Then the part I did not plan for… Readers here donated, and I used that money to pay an influencer to cover the app, which brought in a few thousand more installs. Those users brought in the next round. Every install on that chart traces back through that chain to a Daily Kos comment section in March. There is a lesson in the fact that 183 installs were produced by local news stations across the country while one community produced tens of thousands of installs. I wrote about this on my Substack. The short of it is: people who care about a problem already move differently than the general population who stumbles upon a segment about that problem in their news feed. One person wrote in to say it was hard for them to read. That led to me noticing a styling issue that I hadn’t caught, but fixing it made the app easier to use for everybody. Others have printed posters and flyers with the AntiFreeze logo and are holding them up as signs at the No Kings protests. People have also started handing out Know Your Rights cards with the AntiFreeze logo on them, which I did not ask them to do. I only found out about this out of the blue. So: thank you. Without this site, AntiFreeze would still be a hobby project with 150 users and me groaning at the idea of having to renew the domain name. What it actually does You open AntiFreeze.app, install it as a web app on your phone, and pick your area. When someone spots an ICE in your area, you’ll get a buzz from your phone. You can also report sightings yourself. All of this works in English and Spanish (more languages coming soon, too). What it does not do matters more: - No account. No email, no phone number, no login. - No location history. The app does ask for your location, and it uses it: when you open AntiFreeze it checks where you are so it can alert you if a sighting gets reported within five miles. It keeps only your current position. Each new reading overwrites the last, so there is no trail of where you have been sitting on my server for anyone to demand. If you would rather not share it at all, Settings lets you turn auto-location off and set your area by hand. - No IP logging. Your address is never written to disk on my server. To rate-limit abuse without it, the site uses a pseudonymous browser fingerprint that identifies a device, not a person, and is tied to no name or account. The privacy policy spells out exactly how it works. - No ad SDKs, no Google Analytics, no data broker. Traffic stats run on Umami, which I host myself, and I configured it so that even my own analytics instance never receives visitor IP addresses. - Push notifications run on my own infrastructure instead of a commercial push vendor, so no outside company sees who gets alerted about what. I publish a warrant canary and an up-to-date privacy policy. Both are on the site. I’d rather you check my work than take my word for it. I also want to be honest about the limits… This is a community reporting tool, not an intelligence service. The reports that we receive from our community are potentially wrong or even malicious in rare cases. You should never rely upon the AntiFreeze app as your only means of protecting yourself from the criminal behavior of immigration enforcement agents. Know your rights, know your local rapid-response hotline, and treat AntiFreeze as one signal among several. What changed since my first post Partners. IceWatch SoCal uses the app in their organizing. They have been doing this work far longer than I have, and talking to organizers instead of guessing has shaped the app more than anything I came up with on my own. I also traded sighting reports with stopice.net, another ICE-sighting site. Their reports show up in AntiFreeze and mine show up on their site, so users of either one see more of what is happening around them. Neither of us gains anything by hoarding data. Collective Analytics has also played a huge roll in this. They have carried a lot of the administrative weight, which is the part of this I have no background in. They made the introduction to EFF and have helped coordinate calls with prospective fiscal sponsors. Much of that has come through @G2Geek as well as @biogeneticsgirl, who both post here and have put serious work into AntiFreeze. Legal and infrastructure backing. Cloudflare has accepted AntiFreeze into Project Galileo, which provides free security protection to projects dedicated to a public interest that receive attacks. The Electronic Frontier Foundation reviewed the privacy architecture of AntiFreeze. The First Amendment Clinic at Vanderbilt Law School has been advising AntiFreeze regarding the legal exposure of running a tool like this. Nonprofit structure, in progress. I’m working with Aspiration Tech, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, on fiscal sponsorship for AntiFreeze. This has not been finalized yet. Once it’s over, AntiFreeze will be under an actual nonprofit with actual governance. I’ll post again if/when that happens. Support that works. Support tickets for AntiFreeze are open on Signal. There is no email address needed to open a ticket; there is no vendor to the AntiFreeze logs. Growth. Between 70 and 120 new installations of AntiFreeze are occurring every day. This number continues to climb with every escalation of enforcement of anti-anti-freeze laws, which I do not like to have as a metric. What I need from you Three things, in order of how much they matter. Install it. antifreeze.app. Takes about fifteen seconds. A dense network of users in one metro area is worth more than a thin one spread across the country, so if you are in a city with active enforcement, you are the person I most want on this. Put it in front of someone in person. The single highest-converting channel has been one person showing another person on their phone. Church basements, union halls, school pickup lines, your group chat. There are printable Know Your Rights cards on the site with the AntiFreeze address on them, free to download and hand out. There is also merch, shirts and hats and hoodies, if you would rather advertise it on your body. And if you work with an immigrant-serving organization, put me in touch. Follow along online. We post sighting patterns and app updates on Instagram and Bluesky. Sharing a post costs you nothing and reaches people who will never read a diary here. If you can, chip in. You already know what happened to the last round of donations from this site: it bought influencer coverage that roughly doubled the user base. I would rather report results than make promises, so that is the track record I am running on. Right now the money covers servers, domains, and security tooling, which I have been paying out of pocket while working a full-time job. Being straight with you about the structure: fiscal sponsorship is not finalized, so contributions come to me directly and are not tax-deductible. Once the nonprofit is in place I will move fundraising there and say so publicly. GoFundMe is here. If you cannot give money, the first three are worth more anyway. The reason this project exists at 10,000 installs instead of 183 is that people here shared it. I build this in my spare time like on weekends and evenings. Code questions, bug reports, and partnership inquiries all welcome in the comments!