Citizen -- The App That Wants To Be A Cop -- Offered A $30,000 Bounty For The Apprehension Of An Innocent Person
from the nice-going,-fuckos depth
Citizen -- an app for reporting crime and other suspicious events -- wants to be in the police business. The app developers have purchased at least one faux patrol vehicle -- co-branded with Los Angeles Professional Security -- and have been driving it around Los Angeles, California.
But should private companies be in the business of enforcing the law? Most people would say no. We have enough problems with our actual cops -- ones who are supposed to remain on the right side of the Constitution. Private companies don't have these obligations. That's why they don't have the power (or the ability) to take other people's rights away. But the effort to cloud the lines between public and private is continuous, and it's going to do additional damage to citizens who are already subjected to the violations perpetrated by government employees.
Let's not forget that Citizen has always been willing to blur these lines. It debuted as "Vigilante" before its booting from Apple's app store forced a more friendly rebrand. But Citizen hasn't abandoned its vigilante principals. The people at the top of the organizational chart are aggressively pursuing private expansion into public law enforcement space and courting some of the nation's largest police departments.
They're also living up to the "vigilante" moniker. Prior to the leaks to Joseph Cox and Motherboard, Citizen was publicly and privately urging the public to take justice into their own hands, as Scott Morris reports for The Verge. . .
LOL. "Safety network." Whatever. Frame saw this as a chance to turn Citizen from a news receptacle to a newsmaker, despite his mild protestations otherwise. If Citizen could catch a criminal, it would convert it from a receptacle for user videos and police scanner readouts into something that could actually combat crime. Employees were urged on by Frame, who made it clear he had a fever. And the only cure was "MORE VIGILANTISM!" Joseph Cox has obtained even more internal communications about this dangerous farce.
"first name? What is it?! publish ALL info," Frame told employees working in a Citizen Slack room who were working on the case.
"FIND THIS FUCK," he told them. "LETS GET THIS GUY BEFORE MIDNIGHT HES GOING DOWN."
"BREAKING NEWS. this guy is the devil. get him," Frame said. "by midnight!@#! we hate this guy. GET HIM."
Huh. Looks kind of like threats in interstate commerce or whatnot. . .No harm? No foul? Wrong. A person was wrongfully detained as the result of an app's overzealous CEO and his promise of a $30,000 payout. Citizen apologized soon after, calling it a "mistake" it was "taking very seriously." It also promised to overhaul its "internal processes." It seems like the first overhaul should be to prevent its CEO from weaponizing his app and offering bounties for the information leading to arrests. That's not the business Citizen is in. Yet.
Clearly, Citizen wants more. Andrew Frame got his taste for blood. The blood may have been tainted but it hasn't deterred Frame and his app from pushing for its addition to law enforcement's arsenal. But this wielding of its power doesn't bode well for its intrusion into this space. Sure, cops arrest the wrong people all the time. But that doesn't mean private companies should get in on this racket. We need less of this, not more. And when apps like these encourage people to act on their impulses, they not only encourage physical manifestations of users' underlying biases, they place innocent people in harm's way.
Filed Under: bounties, crime reporting app, private law enforcement, vigilant
Companies: citizen
Citizen Continues Its Push To Become Cops-For-Hire By Leaking Sensitive Data... Twice
from the another-confidence-boosting-PR-debacle dept
The bad news keeps coming for Citizen, the app that really wants to be a cop.
Not only is its desire to become some sort of private party/law enforcement hybrid generating it some bad press, but its prior incarnation as "Vigilante" suggests it has always wanted to be in the business of taking down bad guys, with or without the requisite lawfulness.
The former "Vigilante" proved true to its past moniker following a wildfire in California, promising a $30,000 bounty to any user or employee who took down the bad guy identified by Citizen. . .
Citizen is OnAir: Arsonist Pursuit Continues," the notification, which went out to 848,816 Citizen users in Los Angeles, said. "We are now offering a $30,000 reward for any information directly leading to his arrest tonight. Tap to join the live search."
Well… misidentified. After calls from CEO Andrew Frame to "GET THE FUCKER," Citizen had to offer up a bunch of apologies for turning an innocent person into a prime suspect.
Coming on the heels of all of this bad news is even more bad news. . .First off, as Joseph Cox reported late last week,
Citizen leaked a bunch of users' COVID-related data following its expansion into contact tracing late year under the name "SafePass."
Crime and neighborhood watch app Citizen, which also launched a COVID-19 contact-tracing feature and broader citywide COVID surveillance program, exposed users' COVID-related data to the public internet, allowing anyone to view specific users' recent self-reported symptoms, test results, and whether their device had recorded any close contacts with other people using the feature. The information is directly linked to a person's username, which often is the person's full name.
Hacker collective Anonymous was able to access the data and pointed Motherboard in its direction. The exposure of this data runs contrary to Citizen's security claims.
The feature's privacy policy says that "We have specific systems to control data access, and all access is logged and regularly audited." The SafePass website says "Data is private and encrypted" and that contact tracing data is deleted after 30 days (some of the data in the exposed cache dates from earlier than 30 days ago).
And there's also some stuff Citizen doesn't make available to users and site visitors in this data dump.
The list appears to include videos that have been marked for removal from public consumption on the app by Citizen's content moderation team, with some including the tag "Moderator Blocked Stream," according to the hacker and Motherboard's viewing of the files. These videos are still accessible if visited with the direct link included in the scrape.
Not exactly a confidence booster, especially when the app's founder wants Citizen to become a crucial part of the law enforcement experience, if not actually law enforcement itself. But a combination of PR blunders and data breaches sounds about par for the (government) course, so maybe this is just Citizen inadvertently laying the groundwork for its move into the public sector. "
Filed Under: data breach, leaks, private law enforcement, snitching, vigilante
Companies: citizen
Citizen App Again Lets Users Report Crimes — and Experts See Big Risks
The revived video feature could foment racism, increase invasive surveillance, and stoke panic, the experts say.
Citizen, a mobile app that alerts people to nearby emergencies, is testing the reintroduction of a controversial feature that lets users report crimes and incidents on their own by live streaming video.
Created by New York-based startup sp0n, Citizen first launched under the name “Vigilante” in 2016 in New York City, broadcasting alerts of 911 calls to users in the vicinity and allowing those users to send live video from incident scenes, comment on alerts, and report incidents on their own. In a splashy launch video with the hashtag #CrimeNoMore, several young men were depicted rushing to aid a woman who was chased by a menacing stranger; the video instructs users not to “interfere with the crime,” but then adds, “Good luck out there!” Vigilante was met with swift backlash from the public and police departments, and Apple soon pulled the app from its store. At that time, the New York Police Department issued a statement saying, “Crimes in progress should be handled by the NYPD and not a vigilante with a cell phone.”
Several months later, the app rebranded as Citizen, removed the incident reporting feature, and said it was shifting its focus to “safety” and “avoiding crime” — a far cry from its prior positioning.
Citizen’s return to public crime reporting has not been publicized, but is documented on the company’s user support website. The app’s latest version in Apple and Google’s app stores also includes the description: “Keep Your Community Safe: Report incidents right when they happen to protect the people around you.” . .
Location data, privacy, and surveillance
Experts say Citizen’s location data collection raises questions about privacy and surveillance, the government’s interest in such data, and the lack of oversight into location data tracking.
'FIND THIS FUCK:' Inside Citizen’s Dangerous Effort to Cash In On Vigilantism
. . .Citizen's grand vision has never been a secret: From its initial launch as an app called "Vigilante" in 2016, the company pictured a world in which people were alerted to crime as it happened, and then app users stepped in to stop it before the police needed to intervene. In the Vigilante launch advertisement, a criminal stalks and then attacks a woman in New York City. The app broadcasts the location of this active crime to Vigilante's users, and a horde of people descend on the criminal, stopping the crime in progress: "Can injustice survive transparency?" the ad asks.
Thus far, however, Citizen has essentially been a social network for reporting crime that operates in around 50 cities. Citizen workers listen to and summarize police scanner audio as "incidents," which are then pushed to the app. Users can also post their own incidents, upload photos and videos, and comment on or react to incidents with emojis. The app allows users to search "around you" for incidents, and also sends push alerts to users for nearby events.
"The whole idea behind Protect is that you could convince people to pay for the product once you’ve gotten them to the highest point of anxiety you can possibly get them to," one former employee said, referring to Citizen's subscription service. "Citizen can’t make money unless it makes its users believe there are constant, urgent threats around them at all times," they added. A Citizen spokesperson denied this in a statement: "It’s actually the opposite. With user feedback in mind, we have designed the Citizen home screen so users only see relevant, real-time information within their immediate surroundings," the spokesperson said.
Citizen incentivizes both its employees and the public to create incidents because they are the core currency of the app and what drives user engagement, user retention, and a sense of reliance on the app itself. The scrape of Citizen data published by the hacker earlier this week and shared with Motherboard shows at least 1.7 million incidents in the United States.
The weekly incidents on Citizen, using data scraped by the hacker. Image: Ishaan Jhaveri, Computational Research Fellow, Tow Center for Digital Journalism, Columbia University.
Workers have been measured by how many Citizen users see incidents they covered, how many reports they produce, and how quickly they do so, multiple former employees told Motherboard.
"It’s basically an anxiety sweatshop," a Citizen source said. "On days when things are 'slow,' they relax the standards around incidents because a dip in incident count is really bad," they added. The company sends congratulatory emails announcing which analysts reported the highest number of incidents, another source added.
This results in Citizen warning users about "everything," according to one former employee. This includes lost dogs, minor car crashes, unsubstantiated reports of gunshots, and domestic incidents, they said. This week in Los Angeles, incidents ranged in severity from "assault" to "gunfire" to "two men brawling" to "injured bird," "firefighter activity," and "crowd gathered."
“In a healthy society we are typically not incentivized to sensationalize mundane events and code them as crime. I can’t help but think it plays into people’s anxieties and fears and magnifies people’s fears of the other,” Gilliard said. “What’s really dangerous is the ways they’re starting to serve as infrastructure, where people start to feel like they have to use them to maintain society and order.”
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