On Monday, the civil rights group Sikh Coalition
released a new app for Android and iPhone that they hope will make it easier
for airline travelers to report and file profiling or harassment complaints to
the Transportation Security Administration (TSA). The app is called FlyRights
and the coalition created it as a response to a history of large amounts of
secondary screening towards Sikhs and other religious and ethnic minorities at
airports in the USA. The forms used by the app are drawn directly from the TSA
website. The goal of this app is to make
it easier to file a complaint of profiling or harassment. The app does this by allowing the users to bypass
the website in order to reduce the time lag between the submissions of an
incident occurrence and filing a complaint.
The app provides a simple design for ease of use with three buttons on its home screen. The three buttons are “Report” (links to a form where user input their name, e-mail, phone, address, airport, airline flight and describe incident in question, followed by a “Send Report Now” button), “Know Your Rights”, and “About the Sikh Coalition.”
Other civil rights leaders and politicians praised the app.
I think this is a good use of an app. I know that the majority of airline employees are just doing their job, but it’s the ones that use their position of power to harass people of different religions and ethnicity that makes this kind of technology necessary. I know how difficult it is to file any kind of report in a bureaucratic system. I’m sure many people just don’t file the complaint because of the time and aggravation involved with the process. I believe that an app that makes it easy for someone to file a complaint will reduce the power of the employee who would engage in profiling or harassment.
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