When Your Freedom Depends On an App
On the day Layla got out of prison and back to her home in Georgia, she was told she would need to purchase a smartphone—not an insignificant task for someone who’d just completed a sentence, but Layla was lucky to have a friend who could buy one for her. She says she was at home in bed a few days later when the app she had been mandated to install under the terms of her release went off unexpectedly, the high-pitched warning alarm blaring as it sent a notification to her parole officers telling him that she was not, in fact, at home.