In case people are missing the broader point of the article, beyond the horrifying incident at the beginning:
"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,"
...
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.
...
"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.
...
A former employee added, "They don’t much care about the accuracy or the usefulness of the information they put out, they just want to push as many notifications to create that feeling of vulnerability that leads people to the subscription services."
> 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,"
There are a lot of businesses built on this model. The news outlets spring immediately to mind.
Oh god. Reminds me of this talk given a certain lawyer, Cliff Ennico, called "How to sell anything to anybody". I watched it by recommendation of a family member, and the very gist of it is: there are two reasons people buy stuff - desire, and fear. If you can artificially inflate either and promise your product will resolve their discomfort, people will rush to buy your wares.
I remember being both appalled at the deep immorality of exploiting this, and scared of how true this is.
In this instance, we have a company that went with the "induce fear" approach.
A different, really strong example of selling on fear is the whole cottage industry of products and services for parents. People who are expecting or just had their first child are probably the easiest group to sell to. I say that as a relatively fresh parent myself. All you have to do is to hint that there's a non-zero probability of some danger to life or health of a newborn, and say that your product mitigates it, and you can sell us absolutely anything at almost any price.
Yeah, a coworker convinced me to install Citizen and after a week or two I had to block its notifications. It was very consistent in keeping a distracting baseline volume going, regardless of the severity of the incidents. For a little while it was amusing in a voyeuristic way (oh good, someone else reporting a crackhead brandishing a stick two miles away, ahhh check out the nutjobs in the comments section), but ultimately totally useless to me, especially from a "personal safety" perspective. I guess I'm not the target market here.
I don't use Nextdoor or the Neighbors app but I get the impression that they work in a similar fashion - get the worried people in the area all worked up about every little thing - keep them thinking they are under constant threat.
As an observer from the other side of the pond, I do feel that there's lots of companies built on unsubstantiated fear in the US. Times change and so do the threats, but in a nutshell:
•Nuclear bunkers to keep your family safe.
•Big guns because they will come for you.
•All sorts of tracking devices for kids.
•Surveillance systems for homes
So the latest seems to be a modern day witch-hunting for masses.
When people feel insecure they're soon going to ask for their liberties to be removed. Every politician knows that, and fueling that feel is the best recipe to create a soft dictatorship with public approval.
The SLOs (senior lead officer) for various LA neighborhoods used to debunk a lot of the Citizen reports which got cross-posted to LA facebook groups. They stopped last year because it was just too much work, saying to just assume that anything you see on Citizen is fake unless you have external corroboration of the report from a non-Citizen source.
This implied diagnosis is very similar to Bowling for Columbine's thesis about the news in America, its hunger for sensationalism and viewers making it amplify the perception of threat so that people felt they needed to be armed.
I do notice, at least in my city, that there seem to be a lot more reports of violent crime in my area on citizen than I would expect from looking at the city's official crime map data. that said, I don't trust the city enough to conclude that the inaccuracy is mostly on citizen's side.
> Citizen, using a new livestreaming service it had just launched called OnAir, would catch the suspect live on air, with thousands of people watching.
I'm sorry, is this describing real life or an episode of Black Mirror? It's so blatantly dystopian that I'm at a loss for words.
Minority Report came out in 2002. I remember people were talking about the targeted advertising going on in the movie. Two years later Facebook came out along with their pitch deck[1]. Now that movie seems quaint.
Developers and entrepreneurs are actively chasing dystopia. We've become increasingly numb and blasé about the encroachment of the internet and smartphones into our lives. Eventually we'll have The Running Man with live streaming. The end result of our social isolation and filter/engagement bubbles due to technology is moral apathy and rot. To speak the VC speak, the past few years have validated a market for cruelty, hate, and mob justice. The only question left is, how do I buy in today? Citizen seems like an early answer to this.
Yeah, for the first couple of paragraphs, I was sure they're summarizing some movie. Because I've already seen this exact story at least twice, played out to disastrous consequences.
One take was in "The Circle". Still not sure why people hate that movie, it's pretty much a documentary on Google and Facebook, and about the only fictional element in it are the advanced video cameras. That, and this vigilante crime tracking, which until now I thought nobody was insane enough to try and make a startup of.
It is real life. I’ve uninstalled the app multiple times because it was obvious that it was manufacturing anxiety. I was the first in my circles to delete Facebook and other social media profiles for the same reason (actually delete the profile not just uninstall). I felt others just didn’t notice what was going on. With Citizen I then learned to just disable notifications.
It's crazy watching the world turn into a dystopia and being powerless to stop it. It not just about this company. If they fail another will replace it. Society seems to be on a convergent path with dystopian scifi. This, Chicago police automated policing program (detects crime before it happenes and actually hurt innocent people), racially biased facial recognition.
I read an article today about some DNA software being used to convict someone to death row. His legal team couldn't view the source code to challenge its probabalistic accuracy.
It doesn't seem like there is even a place to start. A first step could be making a website that documents and tracks all these things then forming a pac. But how long will the take before and if it starts effecting change
> This, Chicago police automated policing program (detects crime before it happenes and actually hurt innocent people)
One of the worst things I've seen was posted here on HN[1] almost a year ago. It's an in-depth report on a similar program to Chicago's, but in Florida.
There was a companion article[2] with videos from the program, and it's just horrifying. It shows several videos taken from body cameras of police officers harassing, assaulting and abducting people, some of them children, because they showed up in their system as being related to, or knowing, people who are suspected, and not convicted, of crimes.
Here's a summary of the program[3], and law enforcement's own comments about its purpose:
> The motivation of the program is more sinister than merely “fighting crime”: The Sheriff’s Office acknowledged that they want these “problem people” gone. Pasco County Sheriff Chris Nocco, the architect of the program, boasted that the goal was to predict which residents are likely to commit crimes and then “take them out.” In the words of a former Pasco County deputy, they were under orders to “[m]ake their lives miserable until they move or sue.”
> Citizen does moderate comments, but "two people having an argument about whether or not someone’s comment is racist drives engagement,"
LOL, my publicist does this on linkedin and other places for us because people are gullible.
Source article: Executive of <Company> does a thing
0 engagement, nobody knows
Social Media version: [First] <Race> Executive of <Company> does a thing
15,000 comments, 2 million reach, supporters and detractors argue with each other on the headline creating more engagement. Messages role in. Its perfect and yes we think you are all dumb. Always remember who is shaking the bottle that you’re inside of.
While many employees at Citizen felt the Pacific Palisades incident was a huge mistake, Andrew Frame looked at it differently. While Frame showed some contrition, he sees the bounty experiment as a "massive net win," a step on the way for his app to become a private safety network that is "going into what the government is failing to do," which is, in the company's mind, failing to keep people safe, according to his Slack response to Prince.
-----
Citizen's culture seems fundamentally rotten and I think I understand why with this CEO.
About 5 years ago I met these guys when I was building a smart city startup in NYC. We helped cities unify their data from various vendors they use, one of the data streams was a computerized 911 dispatch. Vigilante (at the time) was interested in getting access to the 911 dispatch API. I had a long conversation with them and they couldn't understand/answer any difficult questions - I was extremely uncomfortable- nevertheless, I took it to a few cities and floated the idea of allowing them to tap in, some cities seemed marginally interested but wanted to provide access to the data with a 10+ minute delay on it so as to prevent ambulance chasing/vigilantism... of course this was useless to them, they needed real time, so they stuck to transcribing 911 dispatch from the radio waves.
Given they couldn't/wouldn't ask basic questions about safety, I'm not at all surprised this is happening.
I know this is beside the main point of the article - but the fact that the CEO's surname is Frame is one of these truth is stranger than fiction moments. If you wrote up a drama about someone writing an app like this and gave the CEO that surname you'd be called a hack.
Well, the app was originally called Vigilante with the goal of enabling... mob justice. So, this really isn't surprising.
Applying contemporary growth hacking and engagement techniques to making people feel afraid and seek private security is just abominable. LA county is 10 million people - there are going to be all kinds of criminal activities on any given day, but rarely anywhere close to you. The app though will make sure even a minor thing a few miles from you gets you revved up. Just a recipe for more social disfunction.
The worst part is that LA county and city decided to use Citizen for contract tracing during the pandemic, which drove up downloads in the LA: https://covid19.lacounty.gov/covid19-news/la-county-city-lea... - they really need to push back on this vigilante stuff now.
To clarify: the bounty was $10-30k for information leading to a specific suspect's arrest. When I first heard about it, it sounded like the bounty was a 'dead or alive' kind of thing.
That the bounty sounded like that is enough to make it harmful and despicable. There are enough wingnuts out there who don't think about niceties that you can easily have someone jumping in and starting to assault someone who appears to be the wanted person (but probably isn't).
Remember the impact on the victim beyond physical safety, both their reputation and the emotional cost. I hope they sue the f** out of Frame and Citizen.
American HN readers: Is everything alright? It seems a new kind of on-the-edge over there. Does it truly feel unsafe to the extent that people resort to violent and intrusive systems like these?
We talk a lot about mobs here. It seems someone has monetized the mob. Not only am I disappointed in the proponents of mobs and call out culture, but I am doubly disappointed in the people who profit from them. Social media, Citizen/Vigilante, to the mainstream news.
It's been like this forever. Tribalism is nothing new. We are predisposed to think like this, because our violent and tribal ancestors hundreds of thousands of years ago killed off lineages who might have been more predisposed to peaceful, collective thought. Look at the abhorrant acts that charismatic leaders were able to make their fanatics do to other humans throughout history. Ancient times were no different. Fearing the dangerous other may have even meant survival in a warlike time. Humanity went through a bottleneck and we are what emerged bloodied over warring for resources. To fight this natural tendency take serious education in critical thinking to recognize these biases, and root them out.
> In Slack messages viewed by Motherboard, Frame calls ProtectOS, the system Citizen uses to create incidents and push them out to users, "the most powerful operating system ever created."
Sounds like the fictional CTOS from the Watch_Dogs games.
Perhaps this is a mere symptom of some other problem.
In Canada I dont personally recall witnessing crime in my adult life. If I saw someone doing something criminal today I would just you know... call the cops.
Perhaps in the USA the lived experience is somewhat different? Maybe more crime? Maybe the police dont show up?
This shit needs to be shut down. All it's doing is manufacturing a new normal for society to always be on edge and to encourage spying on their neighbors.
Reading this made me think, 'Wouldn't it be nice if there was an app that just called out people for doing generous/friendly/artistic/impressive things locally?'
I want to try my hand at the n-gate.com summary for this one:
"Some webshits finish The Wire and answer the question we've all been wondering since the finale aired: why didn't the Baltimore Police simply write an app to crowdsource 'juking the stats'? Citizen (Uber for Reddit's Boston Bomber Fiasco) is born, but Apple doesn't have time to review it as they are busy finishing their own dystopian surveillance nightmare-- Airtag (Uber for Stalking). Luckily, an American HN arrives to remind everyone that actual crime has been falling since the 90s. Given the low probability of anything bad ever happening in the U.S. due widespread misperception of the truth, HN moves on to a story about adtech delivery speedups on client machines."
In the finest Star Trek tradition, you've earned a commendation for a job well done, and the fact that you violated the Prime Directive will be silently ignored.
> In addition, we are focused on reducing the reach of notifications about violent incidents, and increasing the reach of notifications about incidents such as missing people or pets being reunited with their families—we could all use some more good news.
"We would rather provide engaging info than useful info." At least they're honest.
[+] [-] wolverine876|4 years ago|reply
"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,"
...
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.
...
"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.
...
A former employee added, "They don’t much care about the accuracy or the usefulness of the information they put out, they just want to push as many notifications to create that feeling of vulnerability that leads people to the subscription services."
[+] [-] johncessna|4 years ago|reply
There are a lot of businesses built on this model. The news outlets spring immediately to mind.
[+] [-] TeMPOraL|4 years ago|reply
I remember being both appalled at the deep immorality of exploiting this, and scared of how true this is.
In this instance, we have a company that went with the "induce fear" approach.
A different, really strong example of selling on fear is the whole cottage industry of products and services for parents. People who are expecting or just had their first child are probably the easiest group to sell to. I say that as a relatively fresh parent myself. All you have to do is to hint that there's a non-zero probability of some danger to life or health of a newborn, and say that your product mitigates it, and you can sell us absolutely anything at almost any price.
[+] [-] tdumitrescu|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] annoyingnoob|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cosmodisk|4 years ago|reply
•Nuclear bunkers to keep your family safe. •Big guns because they will come for you. •All sorts of tracking devices for kids. •Surveillance systems for homes
So the latest seems to be a modern day witch-hunting for masses.
[+] [-] squarefoot|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gamblor956|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] barrkel|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mr_toad|4 years ago|reply
Sounds like they adopted the business model of the AV industry.
[+] [-] gnarbarian|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] leetcrew|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jakelazaroff|4 years ago|reply
I'm sorry, is this describing real life or an episode of Black Mirror? It's so blatantly dystopian that I'm at a loss for words.
[+] [-] deckard1|4 years ago|reply
Developers and entrepreneurs are actively chasing dystopia. We've become increasingly numb and blasé about the encroachment of the internet and smartphones into our lives. Eventually we'll have The Running Man with live streaming. The end result of our social isolation and filter/engagement bubbles due to technology is moral apathy and rot. To speak the VC speak, the past few years have validated a market for cruelty, hate, and mob justice. The only question left is, how do I buy in today? Citizen seems like an early answer to this.
[1] https://app.slidebean.com/p/s15UZQkE7T/Facebooks-original-pi...
[+] [-] jandrese|4 years ago|reply
https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/451/section9/
[+] [-] TeMPOraL|4 years ago|reply
One take was in "The Circle". Still not sure why people hate that movie, it's pretty much a documentary on Google and Facebook, and about the only fictional element in it are the advanced video cameras. That, and this vigilante crime tracking, which until now I thought nobody was insane enough to try and make a startup of.
[+] [-] munk-a|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dangrossman|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] manuelabeledo|4 years ago|reply
There is a large market for morbidity.
[+] [-] bhupy|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vmception|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] getcrunk|4 years ago|reply
It doesn't seem like there is even a place to start. A first step could be making a website that documents and tracks all these things then forming a pac. But how long will the take before and if it starts effecting change
[+] [-] heavyset_go|4 years ago|reply
One of the worst things I've seen was posted here on HN[1] almost a year ago. It's an in-depth report on a similar program to Chicago's, but in Florida.
There was a companion article[2] with videos from the program, and it's just horrifying. It shows several videos taken from body cameras of police officers harassing, assaulting and abducting people, some of them children, because they showed up in their system as being related to, or knowing, people who are suspected, and not convicted, of crimes.
Here's a summary of the program[3], and law enforcement's own comments about its purpose:
> The motivation of the program is more sinister than merely “fighting crime”: The Sheriff’s Office acknowledged that they want these “problem people” gone. Pasco County Sheriff Chris Nocco, the architect of the program, boasted that the goal was to predict which residents are likely to commit crimes and then “take them out.” In the words of a former Pasco County deputy, they were under orders to “[m]ake their lives miserable until they move or sue.”
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24363871
[2] https://projects.tampabay.com/projects/2020/investigations/p...
[3] https://ij.org/case/pasco-predictive-policing/
[+] [-] vmception|4 years ago|reply
LOL, my publicist does this on linkedin and other places for us because people are gullible.
Source article: Executive of <Company> does a thing
0 engagement, nobody knows
Social Media version: [First] <Race> Executive of <Company> does a thing
15,000 comments, 2 million reach, supporters and detractors argue with each other on the headline creating more engagement. Messages role in. Its perfect and yes we think you are all dumb. Always remember who is shaking the bottle that you’re inside of.
[+] [-] arkitaip|4 years ago|reply
-----
Citizen's culture seems fundamentally rotten and I think I understand why with this CEO.
[+] [-] UncleMeat|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] neom|4 years ago|reply
Given they couldn't/wouldn't ask basic questions about safety, I'm not at all surprised this is happening.
[+] [-] duncan-donuts|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] munk-a|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wearywanderer|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] contemporary343|4 years ago|reply
Applying contemporary growth hacking and engagement techniques to making people feel afraid and seek private security is just abominable. LA county is 10 million people - there are going to be all kinds of criminal activities on any given day, but rarely anywhere close to you. The app though will make sure even a minor thing a few miles from you gets you revved up. Just a recipe for more social disfunction.
The worst part is that LA county and city decided to use Citizen for contract tracing during the pandemic, which drove up downloads in the LA: https://covid19.lacounty.gov/covid19-news/la-county-city-lea... - they really need to push back on this vigilante stuff now.
[+] [-] vmception|4 years ago|reply
This sums up my experience with diverse opinions and observations in tech companies
[+] [-] generalizations|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joe_the_user|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wolverine876|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] grenoire|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kodah|4 years ago|reply
We are so lost.
[+] [-] asdff|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fmakunbound|4 years ago|reply
Sound's like they have a winning formula if Facebook is any indication of successful tech.
[+] [-] Terr_|4 years ago|reply
Sounds like the fictional CTOS from the Watch_Dogs games.
[+] [-] cyral|4 years ago|reply
Gives me watch dog vibes too. Sounds more like a CRUD app though.
[+] [-] selfhoster11|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andyjih_|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] petermcneeley|4 years ago|reply
Perhaps in the USA the lived experience is somewhat different? Maybe more crime? Maybe the police dont show up?
[+] [-] JohnWhigham|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] klunger|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jancsika|4 years ago|reply
"Some webshits finish The Wire and answer the question we've all been wondering since the finale aired: why didn't the Baltimore Police simply write an app to crowdsource 'juking the stats'? Citizen (Uber for Reddit's Boston Bomber Fiasco) is born, but Apple doesn't have time to review it as they are busy finishing their own dystopian surveillance nightmare-- Airtag (Uber for Stalking). Luckily, an American HN arrives to remind everyone that actual crime has been falling since the 90s. Given the low probability of anything bad ever happening in the U.S. due widespread misperception of the truth, HN moves on to a story about adtech delivery speedups on client machines."
[+] [-] TeMPOraL|4 years ago|reply
Also: "Hackernews", not "HN".
[+] [-] koi66|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] jfrunyon|4 years ago|reply
"We would rather provide engaging info than useful info." At least they're honest.