Looks like they explicitly plan on incorporating bounties into the app itself.

My prediction is someone will go all viligante and beat/maim/kill someone, probably who is innocent. Then the app will get pulled.

>My prediction is someone will go all viligante and beat/maim/kill someone, probably who is innocent. Then the app will get pulled.

That's always been their intention. Well, not to kill anyone, but to track people down. The app was originally called vigilante and Apple pulled it from the app store, so they rebranded and now we have Citizen. Maybe Apple will do it again before anything even worse happens than the recent $30k bounty on an innocent person.

I tried using “Citizen” a few years back. You can only use it if you’re willing to share location data either whenever you’re using the app or all the time.

No. Maybe that’s fine by others but any app I can’t put a zip code into is deleted now.

It’s creepy and weird to ask for location data. Where are the apps that default to zip code and offer me the option to have myself tracked everywhere I go for more personalized output?

We need better device virtualization tech.

With VM you could spoof a different location. Some ppl use emulators but I find them too slow usually.

You don't need a VM for that. Hell, there are apps that'll do it with one tap. Android-only, of course.

Is it easier now? Last time I tried (years) app could see location was spoofed so I had to root to spoof better and then many apps could see I was rooted and refused to run.

Hmm, I use an app called "Fake GPS" which works perfectly, but I am rooted (and all apps run fine).

All of my banking apps detected and refused to open in rooted envs. Maybe that changed.

Either it changes or Magisk Hide is doing a good job. I don't know about your specific bank, though.

Magisk Hide probably.

Download "Fake Traveler" from F-Droid, set it as your "mock location app" in Android Developer options. No need to be rooted.

Thanks! I will give it a try. For context I was playing Pokemon Go at the time and that may be why it was harder.

It's useful for governments to have access (via supeana of course) to history of their citizens location. In case they start getting uppity. Just makes it easier to intimidate, suppress, and oppress.

Android 12 will have the option on the user side to give precise or approximate location data, which should be sufficient for privacy.

We should have the ability to supply arbitrary sensor data by default. It is my phone in my pocket, after all.

Maybe they pull it again if people start reporting it.

Westworld has taken a huge downturn (hey, people like the sex and killing of robots that don’t know they’re robots in a Wild West theme park... let’s remove that entirely from our show!)... but this is entirely a central plot device in that show.

An app where people accept contracts for quick cash. It’s supposed to be a dystopian element of their society, not a blueprint.

There seems to be no dystopian fantasy so bad that someone doesn't take it as a blueprint. A kind of Poe's Law for dystopias.

I mean westworld is a really dumb show.

> My prediction is someone will go all viligante and beat/maim/kill someone, probably who is innocent. Then the app will get pulled.

I think it's more likely the first time this happens the person is actually guilty, and there will be a huge debate as to whether or not it's a good thing.

queue the "if we save only 1 child, its worth it" theme music as well.

As much as ‘queue’ looks like it would make sense, the word is actually ‘cue’

dang it! I even had cue first!

But you changed it to the next word in the queue?

ah yes, won't anyone think of the children?

I thought the Rico app in Westworld season 3 was kind of silly but I guess not now that it has an upcoming release date.

And the huge debate will suddenly stop when an innocent person is killed and everybody will always have been dead set against it.

And then it will come out that the vigilante has a sketchy, checkered past, possibly including jail time.

Jail time is not an indicator of a bad person. The US likes to lock up people for the crime of being poor.

That's correct. Notice, however, that I mentioned the actual crimes first, and added "jail time" as an afterthought. There are plenty of criminals who commit real crimes and don't get jail time, or even much punishment. See e.g. Brock Turner, Shane M. Piche, Zoe Reardon, George Zimmerman, Isaac Turnbaugh, etc.

But what if they don't?

Then they'll scramble to find anything they can to slander the person, such as a parking ticket

Don't forget about naughty pictures such as the subject holding mind-altering drugs such as coffee or alcohol.

> I think it's more likely the first time this happens the person is actually guilty, and there will be a huge debate as to whether or not it's a good thing.

No there won't. There have been serial killers who used common apps to find their victims, along with people who rob, assault, harass and stalk people they find on apps. People don't really care. Even the justice system doesn't care because the companies are able to argue that Section 230 means that they aren't liable for what users do with their products[1].

[1] https://www.americanbar.org/groups/diversity/women/publicati...

Right but there is a difference between people posting on a social media app and the app targeting someone itself. Citizen is encouraging others to find this person. So they would be held liable.

I'd imagine that they'd argue that they are not responsible for what users do in response to a bounty being posted on their interactive computer service, and courts would agree.

How do you determine if a dead person is guilty? AFAIK no prosecutor will indict a corpse.

Everyone is guilty until proven innocent.

Never expected to see “Bounty Hunters as a Service” (BHaaS) become a viable tech business model…

I actually don't understand their business model. $20 per month will in no way cover the cost to send security guards your way, or maybe I'm misunderstanding something here.

It sounds like the current $20 offering is to have a remote employee monitoring you when you walk home alone, or the like. The contemplated new service, Protect, is not currently available to the public, and there's nothing indicating it would be $20/mo.

My guess is there will be tiers based on anticipated usage, like AAA. Want X number of monthly reports? That costs $Y. If you want 2X the reports and expedited response time, it costs $2Y.

People paying for getting really intrusively surveiled?

A friend startup-pitched exactly this idea (remote monitoring by request, e.g. late-night walks home) to me 6 years ago and found me less enthusiastic than he had perhaps hoped, it's strange to think about how many people might converge on similar ideas at the roughly same time

Not particularly surprised to see it realized in this way

I have a few surveillance ideas more interesting than that but think they are immoral.

It’s sad that someone else will implement them anyway.

The same poor employee will be sitting there making shit pay, monitoring 30 people simultaneously. Then they will get bored and fall asleep and miss when something really happens.

>$20 per month will in no way cover the cost to send security guards your way

it will more than cover a drone. Especially AI based one instead of being remotely controlled. You can imagine that they can park a lot of drones around the city so the reaction time will be in seconds. While real people sometimes [think that they] have to use deadly force to protect themselves, a drone has no-self-preservation concerns (i hope it will be that way at least for some near future :) and thus can just blanketly use a lot of non-deadly force - acoustic, electric shock, 96GHz beamed power, etc.

You're going for a walk late at night - just a click in the app would get you a drone or a robot dog to accompany you for a walk. The drone or the dog is already imprinted with your voice from the app for the duration of the walk, so you can command it at any moment.

So if I don't like your face at the corner, I'd order a drone equipped with a taser as a backup? An AI-controlled drone that listens to my voice?

Now what if you also order one? Did you make sure to get the premium subscription which includes DAD Drone Area Denial to keep other drones out? Because I did...

it is just like today - i may have a knife and you have a gun, only those robotic "knife" and the "gun" will be "smart", more powerful than a knife and probably than a gun, at least the robot would shoot much better than an average person, and come with subscription fee.

Also, while people in many places can't get a license to carry various weapons, a large cash flush corporation can push through the regulations Uber-style and get the regulations to allow their robots to carry and use those weapons.

This is scifi territory, this is nowhere near doable right now.

I'd rather move to a safer place.

Almost everywhere in USA is safe. Even more so W. Europe. Need civilwar or live in place rules by warlords to be dangerous.

The chance of you suffering crime (unless u look for it like join gang) is vanishingly small. Media just constantly reports and massive amplifies fear generation on the most dramatic BS happening anywhere cause fear sells.

For instance more or almost the same number if people die by 2nd Hand Smoke as die if gunshots in USA. About half of gunshots deaths all self inflicted suicides. But every thinks there is some huge issue with gun violence. Wed save tens of thousands of lives every year outlawing smoking. But smoking isn't scary like "assault weapon". Doesn't sell ads and first get you reelected

you underestimate the power of marketing and societal mass self-delusion :) Just look around - there is no children and Ring cameras everywhere. 30 years ago the children were playing outside unsupervised.

I remember getting trapped by bullies inside a cone made of concrete at an industrial site along the railroad tracks 50 years ago. They were threatening to kill me and given the remoteness of the site and the fact that these kids often killed animals it was plausible. I climbed up, hung from the edge, and let myself fall, hurt my ankle, and then ran. Is that what you want for your kids?

I don’t get it, is that anecdotal experience supposed to provide guidance for all children?

I’ve been jumped several times in my life. And yes, I’d much prefer my child walks outside alone just like I still enjoy walking outside unsurveiled. The world sucks, I’ve yet to find the place were continuous surveillance makes that better.

YMMV, people have different views, I was never harmed beyond a two week long headache in any of my incidents, otherwise I just lost personal belongings like phones and wallets.

Yeah this feels like really close to an assassination market haha

Kind of awesome that Apple hasn't pulled an app that is literally used for committing violence against innocent people but anything pornographic gets banned pretty fast.

Very 'Western Civilization'. Murdering is waaaaay more societally acceptable than the sexxors.

It's uniquely American. Most of Western Civilization is not like this. We're like this because this country was full of puritans and other religious people at the founding.

What’s uniquely American is thinking that our history of religious Puritanism is somehow uniquely American.

But it very much is, at least in a "Western world" context which usually also includes Europe, were attitudes to violence and nudity can be completely reversed to the US.

For one of the most prominent examples, just compare the US to Germany: For decades Germany censored very mundane video games, like Counter Strike or Doom, for their depiction of violence.

In games like Command&Conquer, Half-Life and others, whole enemy units and models were replaced to appease the German rating boards. The original DOS Doom game was only "unbanned" in 2011.

A lot of violent movies and TV shows are only aired in censored versions in Germany, yet on these very same channels, during late night, there regularly is completely barrier free soft-core erotica content that for many Americans would qualify as "porn".

Another example is the naturism/nudist culture that very much has a old and somewhat popular tradition in Germany as FKK. It's also a thing in the US, yes, but it never was on a comparable mainstream level like in Germany.

These differences exist because there simply isn't this one unified "Western culture" that some people stipulate to be a thing.

This whole post is a non-sequitir.

Op was about religious ideas from the 1600s that were far from uniquely American. They’re an ingredient! But let’s not get carried away with the 7th grade social studies stuff.

I'd say OP meant puritanism as it evolved in USA after those puritans were driven out of Europe to new world.

Most of W Europe doesn't seem aligned with 1600 views today. Significant parts of US culture is aligned with 17-1800 us puritanism views.

DING DING DING

Name one other Western Civilization country that has the same kind of attitude towards sex.

Australia and the UK have porn filters on their internet. Australia also has weirdly strict child porn law that can turn an innocent recording from broadcast TV into illegal porn by simple editing. Simpsons porn is illegal too, despite the characters having the wrong number of fingers to be human.

The UK's most popular newspaper ran with "page 3" topless models until 2015.

https://inews.co.uk/culture/page-3-why-end-stop-no-more-the-...

What kind of editing would cause that? I'll be shocked if this is true. Im curious if thats some interpretation of a law or someone have been convicted because of things like that?

An example I heard of was including mostly scenes showing a child's crotch area and dubbing dirty (but legal) music over it.

The world is bigger than Western countries.

Saudi Arabia, Egypt and other countries come to mind along with the USA when I think of religious puritanism.

How is a relevant to a claim about Western civilization?

There are countries where a woman can be murdered by her family for having an unapproved romance.

And those are not Western countries.

They did pull the same app when it was called “vigilante”

Not sure how the owners got it through again, but they somehow slipped it through after the namechange.

I suspect it won’t last long on their, particularly after they very publicly and loudly offered money for vigilantes to go after an innocent person.

Who commuted violence?

The one thing I do like about it is knowing why random helicopters are flying above my apartment (in NYC) at various times of day. Like this past Wednesday, around 6 AM. Helicopters hovered overhead keeping me up for an hour. Turns out there was a huge fire a few blocks down. I wouldn't have known otherwise.

Shouldn’t this be the responsibility of police? How hard would it be for the precinct that sent the chopper to also take a minute to update their website (if they have one) or send out a tweet? “Working on putting out a fire on E 71st” ...

Ideally yes, but is it a hard-enough responsibility to mandate? If not, it seems like there is a financial opportunity for a company to fill that request. Especially in the case of time-sensitive emergencies, it seems like "informing the public as things happen" isn't the number one priority.

CIP: Living in downtown Portland, I have way better luck searching recent "#portlandprotests" tweets than I do checking the PPB Twitter feed. The latter usually shows up within 24 hours, but doesn't really solve the immediate curiosity of "why is there a helicopter hovering above my house right now".

It happens in the DC area too. We get a mix of civilian and military helicopters at random times every day, the military ones annoy me the most because they often make the windows shake.

I look forward to using it during Cali fire season

Could also be used to organize a revolutionary movement to overthrow a local government.

Storming the Congress

In NYC at least, most crime reports in the app also come with comment sections full of overt racism.

> $30k bounty for a random homeless person

Playing with fire. And I don’t mean the arsonist.