‘Yelp for Trump Supporters’ Disappears From App Stores

A Yelp-like app created to help snowflake Trump supporters patronize MAGA-friendly, safe spaces disappeared from Apple and Google Play’s app stores after a French security researcher identified major security flaws. The app, called 63red Safe, billed itself as a place for “reviews of local restaurant (sic) and businesses from a conservative perspective.” It’s now listed as “Coming (back) soon!” on the developer’s website.

According to a report by The Daily Beast, 63red Safe allowed users to rate establishments based on four questions, ranging from whether business owners made political posts to social media and if they allowed patrons to carry weapons on the premises. Locations like the Red Hen restaurant in Lexington, Virginia — notorious for 86ing White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders last year — were listed as “unsafe.” The app had reportedly received more than 5,000 reviews since joining 63red’s broader network of apps tailored to right wingers such as a news app called 63red News and a “real-time conservative chat” app called 63red Talk.

Although 63red Safe was aimed at “keeping conservatives safe” from people that don’t agree with their political views or red hats, that mantra apparently didn’t translate to user data. On March 11, researcher going by the pseudonym Elliot Alderson posted a series of tweets detailing security flaws in the app that made it easy to find user data. In a post to Medium, 63red Safe’s creator Scott Wallace wrote that “we take security very seriously, and have already taken action to additionally protect our data.” But Wallace went on to call Alderson’s claims a “politically motivated attack” and claimed to have notified the FBI:

We see this person’s illegal and failed attempts to access our database servers as a politically-motivated attack, and will be reporting it to the FBI later today. We hope that, just as in the case of many other politically-motivated internet attacks, this perpetrator will be brought to justice, and we will pursue this matter, and all other attacks, failed or otherwise, to the utmost extent of the law. We log all activity against all our servers, and will present those logs as evidence of a crime.

The app has since been taken down from Apple and Google Play’s app stores. Eater reached out to Apple, Google, and 63red for more information and did not receive a response by press time.

While the 63red Safe app is down, conservatives will simply have to rely on their own intuition and regular (frequently racist) Yelp to find restaurants welcoming to Trump supporters. Maybe they can find a burger restaurant to symbolically protest the Green New Deal.

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