this post was submitted on 19 Feb 2025
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'Uber for Armed Guards' Rushes to Market Following the Assassination of UnitedHealthcare CEO | Are you scared to walk down the streets of NYC and also have too much money? There's an app for that (gizmodo.com)
submitted 3 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
60 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Protector, an app that lets you book armed goons the same way you’d call for an Uber, is having a viral moment.

Protector lets the user book armed guards on demand. Right now it’s only available in NYC and LA. According to its marketing, every guard is either “active duty or retired law enforcement and military.” Every booking comes with a motorcade and users get to select the number of Escalades that’ll be joining them as well as the uniforms their hired goons will wear.

Protector is currently “#7 in Travel” on Apple’s App Store. It’s not available for people who use Android devices. Sorry Google phone fans, if you want your own armed goons you’ll have to resort to more traditional methods of goon employment.

The marketing for Protector, which lives on its X account, is surreal. A series of robust and barrel-chested men in ill-fitting black suits deliver their credentials to the camera while sitting in front of a black background. They’re all operators. They describe careers in SWAT teams and being deployed to war zones. They show vanity shots of themselves kitted out in operator gear. All of them have a red lapel pin bearing the symbol of Protector.

Who is this for, you might ask? A video posted on January 6, 2025, that runs just over two minutes gives the game away. It opens with a photo of assassinated UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. “We’re going to run through a scenario to demonstrate, where if a Protector had been present, crisis could have been averted,” the Protector says in the video. He then runs through several fantasy versions of the assassination where a Protector is on hand to prevent the assassin from killing the CEO.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 days ago

Luigi could’ve passed the screening check to become the guy’s bodyguard. Maybe he even would’ve had a better opportunity to escape.

Many, many ruthless tyrants and other nasty people have been killed by their own bodyguards over the years. And these are often guards who have been properly vetted.

How vetted are these Uber rentacops gonna be? No criminal record doesn’t mean you can trust the person if you’re some ruthless bastard with a lot of enemies.