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.
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.