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If Citizen tanks that strikes me as a beneficial outcome. One of the other commenters here described this app as “snitching-as-a-service” but I think it’s more

If Citizen tanks that strikes me as a beneficial outcome. One of the other commenters here described this app as “snitching-as-a-service” but I think it’s more insidious than that. Citizen is very much in the same pattern as listening to the police scanner continuously: it’s a panic fetish tool. Were actual crimes committed? Citizen doesn’t know. Can you, personally, do anything about the “danger” all around you? Sure! Whittle down your trust in your neighbors more, don’t advocate for different outcomes from your city, hire Citizen’s private security force! It’s “if it bleeds, it leads” masquerading as a public good, only incidentally trying to make a profit on the side.

looseyesterday 4y ago
Yeah its very dystopian. I suspect many of the hard core users have some form of generalised anxiety and are in fact the type of people who shouldn't be using this app at all.
- eh9 4y ago
  It’s nimby catnip.
  - cobaltoxide 4y ago
    Apparently the app was originally called "Vigilante" before being renamed to Citizen.
    - eh9 4y ago
      These specific founder types are so painfully unaware. I’m sure it’s the same idiot who put out a push notification with a $30K bounty on the wrong guy.
    - beeskneecaps 4y ago
      They even had a dramatized commercial with the founders’ wet dream of some girl getting mugged by her car, triggering the app, and a bunch of men showing up at the coordinates to pummel the mugger and save the girl. https://youtu.be/fB6Sqhvm8l8 https://youtu.be/fB6Sqhvm8l8
      - sokoloff 4y ago
        Holy crap; I genuinely thought GP was making a joke when they said it was originally called "Vigilante". Nope.
edgyquant 4y ago
[flagged]
- eh9 4y ago
  THAT is a ridiculous belief and a great example of confirmation bias. You don’t need to monitor crimes happening around you. Go meet your neighbors and build community.
  - genghisjahn 4y ago
    Agreed. I have a friend who lives in a quiet suburb of Dallas who feels like he needs to have a gun in the house to protect his family. I live in an urban neighborhood in Philadelphia. By comparison my neighborhood has WAY more crime of all types. But if I take a walk around the neighborhood I can wave to ~10 people I know by name. I'm not afraid in my "high crime" neighborhood. We've both lived in our neighborhoods for more than 10 years. You can do zipcode comparisons here: https://crimegrade.org/ https://crimegrade.org/
    - leetcrew 4y ago
      > But if I take a walk around the neighborhood I can wave to ~10 people I know by name. that's great, and I'm sure it makes the neighborhood a lot more pleasant to live in. but aside from maybe hiding your amazon packages for you, this doesn't contribute much to safety/security in my experience. one of my friends used to live on a slightly sketchy block where she knew a lot of neighbors. they all ducked for cover when her roommate got robbed at gunpoint on her own front porch. my other friend was friendly with his neighbors. his house got cleaned out by a couple kids who lived three doors down. neither the police, the neighbors, nor even the mother did shit about it. your neighbors might warn you about a "sketchy" person they've seen on the block a few times, but when push comes to shove, people overwhelmingly choose to stay in their lane. they might come to check on you after the dust settles, I guess.
- Spivak 4y ago
  > Who knows what this dude would have done Probably nothing. If he's on the run, "and also stop for some reason to kill or injure a random person, as a treat" can't be high on his priority list.
beeskneecaps 4y ago
They also never follow up on any of the reports, nor can they really. The anonymous comment section is less than useless. The exaggerated camera-shake (maybe due to frame rate reduction in post processing) videos of police lights or a fire in the distance are mildly interesting. Their business model appears to be some sort of call-for-help button. Idk if buttnugs47 will come running to your aid. Gl with that
savanaly 4y ago
Is HN sort of the same phenomenon but for tech? As I was reading your comment I found myself realizing the same description (as a "panic fetish tool") applies to a type of HN thread that's fairly typical. Take this exact response to the tech that you had: I don't know anything about Citizen, nor anyone who uses it, but based on the article title and your comment I find myself getting anxious, my pulse is elevating slightly, I'm now more worried about the world and what tech is doing to it. All this despite the fact that I have no hard info other than a suspicion based on my biases and can do absolutely nothing about it. Perhaps some users do use it in the unhealthy way you mentioned, but perhaps the vast majority don't. In any case the article and exchange are fueling a need that HNers obviously have for reading about dystopian tech, and clearly it goes beyond what is materially useful to them and into what is perversely entertaining.
- smoldesu 4y ago
  Part of it comes down to the fact that Citizen has a pretty comically bad track record. It hasn't even been a week since they texted Billie Eilish's home address to a few hundred thousand people, and many haven't forgotten about their previous app "Vigilante" (most well-known for falsely accusing random strangers of various crimes). On some level, I might agree with you. If Citizen was a crowdsourced non-profit, maybe it would be a healthy relationship. As a business, they directly profit from your fear and insecurity.
- troutwine 4y ago
  By panic fetish tool I mean something of marginal utility — not no utility, mind — that panics the afflicted into a mailable state. So, for Citizen, that’s meant to make you pay them money. For, say, fascist politics that’s meant to make you rely on the comfort provided by Dear Leader. I don’t think it’s clear at all that HN follows the same model. For one the website is free and if they’re trying to make anything happen it’s promote their VC fund, which strikes me as benign. Oh, maybe lisp too in the old days. Additionally, being aware that the utopian vaguely libertarian mindset around tech — everything is better with computers, especially if you can make money at it — is false is not a bad thing. Personally I don’t feel at all powerless to counter that trend, that mindless Utopianism, or to play my part with my neighbors and community in countering it, I should say, since I’m just one person.
asveikau 4y ago
I had this app installed for a short time. I removed it when it said "shots fired" on an affluent block nearby. It was teenagers playing with firecrackers. As happens in the neighborhood quite regularly. I couldn't believe it. Uninstalled immediately. That was years before the "tough on crime" rhetoric/scare/moral panic that's only amplified since then. Edit: people are replying that the data source is 911 calls, as if that leaves them off the hook. Maybe this is evidence that 911 calls should not be sent unfiltered as push notifications. That is on Citizen.
- thepasswordis 4y ago
  It’s speech to texting the police scanners or dispatch. It means somebody called it in as shots fired.
- CydeWeys 4y ago
  The app will take every dumb 911 complaint at face value. Most 911 complaints simply aren't accurate. For every one real gunshot called in, there's many more that end up being a car backfiring, fireworks, etc. And this is true for nearly every category of call 911 gets. Putting the unfiltered feed on a map and sending proximity alerts to app users is less than useless.
  - JAlexoid 4y ago
    Shock value is still very high! You're more likely to click on a clickbait article, you're more likely to open an app to see "naked man with knife seen running around 14st"(something I've seen on Citizen in NYC)
- grubbs 4y ago
  All this means is someone called 911 and reported they heard gunshots. As someone that lives in Baltimore, this happens ALL the time.
- kjkjadksj 4y ago
  I’ve seen it post about a police helicopter overhead, but then I look out with my own eyes and its one of the private ones people rent for sightseeing, not the black and white flying pig.
crazygringo 4y ago
It's certainly not healthy to be perusing Citizen throughout the day, but it's also certainly not "panic fetish". I live in a neighborhood that has a certain amount of crime, and Citizen is super valuable to know what's going on, purely from a safety perspective. You ask if I can personally do anything about the "danger" all around me? Yes, I can make sure as hell to avoid certain blocks for a couple hours. And I can find out whether the sirens right now are because of a fire (fine to go for a walk) or because of exchanged gunfire (not). I just looked it up according to official stats -- 568 shootings in my neighborhood since 2015, resulting in 102 deaths. Maybe you live somewhere where you consider this "panic fetish", but people in some areas don't have that luxury. It's just basic neighborhood safety awareness of where not to walk.
- troutwine 4y ago
  > It's just basic neighborhood safety awareness of where not to walk. Sure, I disagree with none of this particularly. My fundamental contention here is that Citizen with its sloppy text-to-speech of the police scanner plus no real follow-up on reports drives users to perceive their environment as more hazardous than it really is, their basic motivation being to push for pumping money out of people. Having awareness of your neighborhood is great but it strikes me that the better way of getting that awareness is through your community, not someone trying to pull cash out of your pocket. I'd have no problem at all with an app like to Citizen that plugged directly into community emergency services, run by the community as a public good.
  - crazygringo 4y ago
    > no real follow-up on reports... drives users to perceive their environment as more hazardous than it really is I don't know about your neighborhood, but when I check Citizen real events get filled with hundreds of verifications, comments, and videos. It's not a case of Citizen trying to invent things that aren't there, sowing some fake sense of hazard. > the better way of getting that awareness is through your community I don't know what the mechanism of community awareness is supposed to be, except Citizen? That is the community awareness, as people are posting and verifying there. > I'd have no problem at all with an app like to Citizen that plugged directly into community emergency services, run by the community as a public good Citizen is plugged directly into community emergency services -- that's the police. And I just don't see how any app is going to be "run by the community as a public good". That makes as much sense to me as saying people shouldn't use Gmail, but an email app run by the community as a public good. It's not scalable or viable.
filoleg 4y ago
> Were actual crimes committed? Citizen doesn’t know. Often enough in my area, there is an actual video from the scene and/or police response (e.g., "police confirmed that the suspect is on the run" or "12 shells were found on the scene by the firefighters"). In those cases, it is clear that the crimes were actually committed. And sure, there are plenty of instances of incidents on Citizen where those confirmations and videos from the scene might not be available. I just simply filter those out mentally. But let's not make absolutist claims like "everything you see there is unconfirmed and is just spreading panic", because there are more than plenty easily verifiable incidents reported on Citizen.
- giraffe_lady 4y ago
  > I just simply filter those out mentally Incredibly naive to think you can "just" do anything of the sort. Do you also think advertising doesn't affect you, by any chance?
  - filoleg 4y ago
    I mean, I don't live in any state of perpetual fear or anything, and I haven't changed my habits based on it at all (aside from avoiding areas that actively have like 5+ cop cars on the scene at the moment, because traffic there is going to be awful). I filter it out mentally the same way I filter out restaurants I don't like when searching for a place to eat nearby on google maps. That doesn't make google maps a useless or bad tool. Same idea here. And no, I don't think that advertising doesn't affect me. It sometimes can give me options I wasn't aware of (e.g., a new subaru car being prominently featured in a good movie, almost definitely as a product placement), which I would potentially filter out as well when the time to purchase a new car comes (which means doing my research on that car, doing a test drive, etc.). Except with Citizen, filtering out is an effort that takes only a few seconds (does the post have video of the actual incident? does the post have confirmed and verified info, such as a number of bullet shells being recovered? or is it just "report filed" or "people on the scene claim"?).
KwisatzHaderack 4y ago
Not everyone has the privilege of living in safe places like Mountain View. Please don’t diminish others concern for public safety as a “panic fetish tool”, especially for those of us who’ve been the victims of violent crimes. > Whittle down your trust in your neighbors Interestingly, being aware of the crime in my neighborhood (thanks to Citizen and NextDoor) has made me engage more with my neighbors. > don’t advocate for different outcomes from your city Where are you getting this from?
- troutwine 4y ago
  > Not everyone has the privilege of living in safe places like Mountain View. I don't live, nor have I ever, in Mountain View. > Please don’t diminish others concern for public safety as a “panic fetish tool”, especially for those of us who’ve been the victims of violent crimes. My implication here is that Citizen as a 'panic fetish tool' does not improve public safety outcomes. I am very pro improving public safety. I don't doubt that Citizen can be comforting. In fact, that's fundamental to its pitch.
duskwuff 4y ago
> One of the other commenters here described this app as “snitching-as-a-service” but I think it’s more insidious than that. It isn't "snitching as a service"; it's fear as a service. The implicit premise of the app is that the world is a dangerous, terrifying place, and they're more than happy to validate that belief by (as another commenter mentioned) drip-feeding users with irrelevant notifications about emergency service dispatches in their area.

looseyesterday 4y ago

Yeah its very dystopian. I suspect many of the hard core users have some form of generalised anxiety and are in fact the type of people who shouldn't be using this app at all.

eh9 4y ago
It’s nimby catnip.
- cobaltoxide 4y ago
  Apparently the app was originally called "Vigilante" before being renamed to Citizen.
  - eh9 4y ago
    These specific founder types are so painfully unaware. I’m sure it’s the same idiot who put out a push notification with a $30K bounty on the wrong guy.
  - beeskneecaps 4y ago
    They even had a dramatized commercial with the founders’ wet dream of some girl getting mugged by her car, triggering the app, and a bunch of men showing up at the coordinates to pummel the mugger and save the girl. https://youtu.be/fB6Sqhvm8l8 https://youtu.be/fB6Sqhvm8l8
    - sokoloff 4y ago
      Holy crap; I genuinely thought GP was making a joke when they said it was originally called "Vigilante". Nope.

edgyquant 4y ago

[flagged]

eh9 4y ago
THAT is a ridiculous belief and a great example of confirmation bias. You don’t need to monitor crimes happening around you. Go meet your neighbors and build community.
- genghisjahn 4y ago
  Agreed. I have a friend who lives in a quiet suburb of Dallas who feels like he needs to have a gun in the house to protect his family. I live in an urban neighborhood in Philadelphia. By comparison my neighborhood has WAY more crime of all types. But if I take a walk around the neighborhood I can wave to ~10 people I know by name. I'm not afraid in my "high crime" neighborhood. We've both lived in our neighborhoods for more than 10 years. You can do zipcode comparisons here: https://crimegrade.org/ https://crimegrade.org/
  - leetcrew 4y ago
    > But if I take a walk around the neighborhood I can wave to ~10 people I know by name. that's great, and I'm sure it makes the neighborhood a lot more pleasant to live in. but aside from maybe hiding your amazon packages for you, this doesn't contribute much to safety/security in my experience. one of my friends used to live on a slightly sketchy block where she knew a lot of neighbors. they all ducked for cover when her roommate got robbed at gunpoint on her own front porch. my other friend was friendly with his neighbors. his house got cleaned out by a couple kids who lived three doors down. neither the police, the neighbors, nor even the mother did shit about it. your neighbors might warn you about a "sketchy" person they've seen on the block a few times, but when push comes to shove, people overwhelmingly choose to stay in their lane. they might come to check on you after the dust settles, I guess.
Spivak 4y ago
> Who knows what this dude would have done Probably nothing. If he's on the run, "and also stop for some reason to kill or injure a random person, as a treat" can't be high on his priority list.

beeskneecaps 4y ago

They also never follow up on any of the reports, nor can they really. The anonymous comment section is less than useless. The exaggerated camera-shake (maybe due to frame rate reduction in post processing) videos of police lights or a fire in the distance are mildly interesting. Their business model appears to be some sort of call-for-help button. Idk if buttnugs47 will come running to your aid. Gl with that

savanaly 4y ago

Is HN sort of the same phenomenon but for tech? As I was reading your comment I found myself realizing the same description (as a "panic fetish tool") applies to a type of HN thread that's fairly typical. Take this exact response to the tech that you had: I don't know anything about Citizen, nor anyone who uses it, but based on the article title and your comment I find myself getting anxious, my pulse is elevating slightly, I'm now more worried about the world and what tech is doing to it. All this despite the fact that I have no hard info other than a suspicion based on my biases and can do absolutely nothing about it. Perhaps some users do use it in the unhealthy way you mentioned, but perhaps the vast majority don't. In any case the article and exchange are fueling a need that HNers obviously have for reading about dystopian tech, and clearly it goes beyond what is materially useful to them and into what is perversely entertaining.

smoldesu 4y ago
Part of it comes down to the fact that Citizen has a pretty comically bad track record. It hasn't even been a week since they texted Billie Eilish's home address to a few hundred thousand people, and many haven't forgotten about their previous app "Vigilante" (most well-known for falsely accusing random strangers of various crimes). On some level, I might agree with you. If Citizen was a crowdsourced non-profit, maybe it would be a healthy relationship. As a business, they directly profit from your fear and insecurity.
troutwine 4y ago
By panic fetish tool I mean something of marginal utility — not no utility, mind — that panics the afflicted into a mailable state. So, for Citizen, that’s meant to make you pay them money. For, say, fascist politics that’s meant to make you rely on the comfort provided by Dear Leader. I don’t think it’s clear at all that HN follows the same model. For one the website is free and if they’re trying to make anything happen it’s promote their VC fund, which strikes me as benign. Oh, maybe lisp too in the old days. Additionally, being aware that the utopian vaguely libertarian mindset around tech — everything is better with computers, especially if you can make money at it — is false is not a bad thing. Personally I don’t feel at all powerless to counter that trend, that mindless Utopianism, or to play my part with my neighbors and community in countering it, I should say, since I’m just one person.

asveikau 4y ago

I had this app installed for a short time. I removed it when it said "shots fired" on an affluent block nearby. It was teenagers playing with firecrackers. As happens in the neighborhood quite regularly. I couldn't believe it. Uninstalled immediately. That was years before the "tough on crime" rhetoric/scare/moral panic that's only amplified since then. Edit: people are replying that the data source is 911 calls, as if that leaves them off the hook. Maybe this is evidence that 911 calls should not be sent unfiltered as push notifications. That is on Citizen.

thepasswordis 4y ago
It’s speech to texting the police scanners or dispatch. It means somebody called it in as shots fired.
CydeWeys 4y ago
The app will take every dumb 911 complaint at face value. Most 911 complaints simply aren't accurate. For every one real gunshot called in, there's many more that end up being a car backfiring, fireworks, etc. And this is true for nearly every category of call 911 gets. Putting the unfiltered feed on a map and sending proximity alerts to app users is less than useless.
- JAlexoid 4y ago
  Shock value is still very high! You're more likely to click on a clickbait article, you're more likely to open an app to see "naked man with knife seen running around 14st"(something I've seen on Citizen in NYC)
grubbs 4y ago
All this means is someone called 911 and reported they heard gunshots. As someone that lives in Baltimore, this happens ALL the time.
kjkjadksj 4y ago
I’ve seen it post about a police helicopter overhead, but then I look out with my own eyes and its one of the private ones people rent for sightseeing, not the black and white flying pig.

crazygringo 4y ago

It's certainly not healthy to be perusing Citizen throughout the day, but it's also certainly not "panic fetish". I live in a neighborhood that has a certain amount of crime, and Citizen is super valuable to know what's going on, purely from a safety perspective. You ask if I can personally do anything about the "danger" all around me? Yes, I can make sure as hell to avoid certain blocks for a couple hours. And I can find out whether the sirens right now are because of a fire (fine to go for a walk) or because of exchanged gunfire (not). I just looked it up according to official stats -- 568 shootings in my neighborhood since 2015, resulting in 102 deaths. Maybe you live somewhere where you consider this "panic fetish", but people in some areas don't have that luxury. It's just basic neighborhood safety awareness of where not to walk.

troutwine 4y ago
> It's just basic neighborhood safety awareness of where not to walk. Sure, I disagree with none of this particularly. My fundamental contention here is that Citizen with its sloppy text-to-speech of the police scanner plus no real follow-up on reports drives users to perceive their environment as more hazardous than it really is, their basic motivation being to push for pumping money out of people. Having awareness of your neighborhood is great but it strikes me that the better way of getting that awareness is through your community, not someone trying to pull cash out of your pocket. I'd have no problem at all with an app like to Citizen that plugged directly into community emergency services, run by the community as a public good.
- crazygringo 4y ago
  > no real follow-up on reports... drives users to perceive their environment as more hazardous than it really is I don't know about your neighborhood, but when I check Citizen real events get filled with hundreds of verifications, comments, and videos. It's not a case of Citizen trying to invent things that aren't there, sowing some fake sense of hazard. > the better way of getting that awareness is through your community I don't know what the mechanism of community awareness is supposed to be, except Citizen? That is the community awareness, as people are posting and verifying there. > I'd have no problem at all with an app like to Citizen that plugged directly into community emergency services, run by the community as a public good Citizen is plugged directly into community emergency services -- that's the police. And I just don't see how any app is going to be "run by the community as a public good". That makes as much sense to me as saying people shouldn't use Gmail, but an email app run by the community as a public good. It's not scalable or viable.

filoleg 4y ago

> Were actual crimes committed? Citizen doesn’t know. Often enough in my area, there is an actual video from the scene and/or police response (e.g., "police confirmed that the suspect is on the run" or "12 shells were found on the scene by the firefighters"). In those cases, it is clear that the crimes were actually committed. And sure, there are plenty of instances of incidents on Citizen where those confirmations and videos from the scene might not be available. I just simply filter those out mentally. But let's not make absolutist claims like "everything you see there is unconfirmed and is just spreading panic", because there are more than plenty easily verifiable incidents reported on Citizen.

giraffe_lady 4y ago
> I just simply filter those out mentally Incredibly naive to think you can "just" do anything of the sort. Do you also think advertising doesn't affect you, by any chance?
- filoleg 4y ago
  I mean, I don't live in any state of perpetual fear or anything, and I haven't changed my habits based on it at all (aside from avoiding areas that actively have like 5+ cop cars on the scene at the moment, because traffic there is going to be awful). I filter it out mentally the same way I filter out restaurants I don't like when searching for a place to eat nearby on google maps. That doesn't make google maps a useless or bad tool. Same idea here. And no, I don't think that advertising doesn't affect me. It sometimes can give me options I wasn't aware of (e.g., a new subaru car being prominently featured in a good movie, almost definitely as a product placement), which I would potentially filter out as well when the time to purchase a new car comes (which means doing my research on that car, doing a test drive, etc.). Except with Citizen, filtering out is an effort that takes only a few seconds (does the post have video of the actual incident? does the post have confirmed and verified info, such as a number of bullet shells being recovered? or is it just "report filed" or "people on the scene claim"?).

KwisatzHaderack 4y ago

Not everyone has the privilege of living in safe places like Mountain View. Please don’t diminish others concern for public safety as a “panic fetish tool”, especially for those of us who’ve been the victims of violent crimes. > Whittle down your trust in your neighbors Interestingly, being aware of the crime in my neighborhood (thanks to Citizen and NextDoor) has made me engage more with my neighbors. > don’t advocate for different outcomes from your city Where are you getting this from?

troutwine 4y ago
> Not everyone has the privilege of living in safe places like Mountain View. I don't live, nor have I ever, in Mountain View. > Please don’t diminish others concern for public safety as a “panic fetish tool”, especially for those of us who’ve been the victims of violent crimes. My implication here is that Citizen as a 'panic fetish tool' does not improve public safety outcomes. I am very pro improving public safety. I don't doubt that Citizen can be comforting. In fact, that's fundamental to its pitch.

duskwuff 4y ago

> One of the other commenters here described this app as “snitching-as-a-service” but I think it’s more insidious than that. It isn't "snitching as a service"; it's fear as a service. The implicit premise of the app is that the world is a dangerous, terrifying place, and they're more than happy to validate that belief by (as another commenter mentioned) drip-feeding users with irrelevant notifications about emergency service dispatches in their area.