Project direction and architecture

[koredefashokun]

I've been thinking about Auxilium again recently, especially since there are more reasons to use the application, now that the COVID-19 situation is slowly declining in most parts of the world.

Development was suspended primarily because I had some privacy and usability concerns with the application. For example, the user experience around reporting emergencies (especially from a first-person point-of-view) did not make sense. Users in danger (or potential danger) would most likely not think about opening an app to send their location to others nearby, as they would be preoccupied with the more important task of trying to stay alive. There was also the potential of the application to encourage vigilante (and other extrajudicial activity by private citizens), which would definitely attract negative attention from authorities. Finally, there was also concerns around storing a lot of location information on a centralized server, which also has the side effect of depleting users' batteries, because the app would have to keep fetching location in realtime to be useful.