fandomshatelgbtqpeople replied:
After receiving your ask I immediately went to verify what you said and I believe you may have misinterpreted some of the information about the lawsuit.
https://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/news/shinigami-eyes-reported-to/
I will be referring to the above link. Please know that it comes from a website dedicated to infosec. If Shinigami Eyes was a leaky app I believe the website would have noted this. Now let’s get into the lawsuit.
The lawsuit contends that Shinigami Eyes violates Norway’s online privacy law and it is filed by a civil liberties organization called Electronic Frontier Norway.
“EFN finds that the use of the program and the operation of the database it uses likely constitutes multiple violations of the GDPR and its Norwegian implementation,” said a spokesperson for EFN.
“The most egregious of these being the clear violation of Article 9 which prohibits the registrations of people’s political views, philosophical convictions and physical persons’ sexual relations or sexual orientations etc.”
My experience with civil liberties organizations is that they tend to take the side of this is your right and I will defend it no matter if you are a good person or a bad person. Think of how many lawsuits the ACLU has filed First Amendment lawsuits on behalf of Nazis.
Their website is here.
https://old.efn.no/eng-index.html
In the bottom of the website they have a button that denotes their Blue Ribbon Online Free Speech Campaign. This leads me to believe that they will fight for free speech on principal.
The part of the lawsuit that is most alarming if read outside of this context is this.
“The software can be used to identify targets for online harassment, doxing, cyberstalking and even physical attacks,” said the NGO.
Now I would not blame anyone for seeing that allegation and worrying that Shinigami Eyes might be used to target them. However given that it makes no mention of who the targets of this potential harassment are, I believe it equally possible that the EFN worries about Terfs being harassed online because of how they are marked.
In conclusion, I do not believe that Shinigami Eyes posses a danger to the trans community here. I believe this lawsuit was filed in earnest by an organization who believe it is there job to protect the online privacy rights of all individuals including terfs.
Shinigami Eyes allows you to mark blogs as transphobic or trans friendly. It does not track the apps users it is basically a community block list. The potential to be targeted based on if your name appears as red or green remains if you use the app or not. If you are concerned about it don’t use it. But we believe it is a good tool to use to prevent engagement with terfs.