A friend had the app and did nothing but post local incidents to a group chat on a daily basis. We told him to stop or get the boot which he did. It illustrated just how uptight this app makes people. He wound up deleting it after a few months because it made him afraid to go outside as if he was surrounded by crime when in fact nothing had changed. (This is in south-west Queens NYC)

Bad things happen on a daily basis. These apps wont stop or deter crime. The best you can do is stay alert and aware of your surroundings.

I'm in LIC/Astoria, I had a similar experience. My wife rolled her eyes at me for ages when I told her about "local" (literally never anywhere close to us) incidents and felt very smug when I finally punted the app forever.

Yes it's anxiety inducing but doesn't it just tell us the truth of who we are?

If you can't handle the anxiety, nobody is forcing you to have it on your phone nor are they forcing you to be part of it.

In other countries, the government has cameras everywhere and use the footage to find and prosecute. Apparently America prefers to have individuals take on that role.

>nobody is forcing you to have it on your phone nor are they forcing you to be part of it.

are you so sure about that? You might happen to be the 'wrong guy' who accidentally gets into the crossfire of the citizen app mob one day.

""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." He was growing impatient. He increased the bounty to $20,000. Thousands of people were watching Citizen's livestream, but the man still hadn't been caught. Frame asked his staff to send out another notification, one that would hit all Citizen users in Los Angeles. The bounty had to go higher. "Close in on him. 30k Let's get him. No escape. Let's increase. 30k," Frame said. "Notify all of la. Blast to all of la.[...]"

"Well after midnight, Los Angeles police made an arrest. In a separate Slack room, employees cautiously began to celebrate: "cop said its an ongoing investigation, this looks like our guy!!!" one employee wrote. It wasn't Citizen's guy. Frame and the entirety of the Citizen apparatus had spent a whole night putting a bounty on the head of an innocent man."

https://www.vice.com/en/article/y3dpyw/inside-crime-app-citi...

Yeah their whole mentality of vigilantism is weird but we should be encouraging citizens to take out their phones and document things. Otherwise George Floyd would be another statistic and nobody would know his name.

The encouragement of cell phone footage works both ways - it can document more crime that induces anxiety from the right or it can document more police abuses. Citizen's agenda is off but their tool of choice is right.

Is "nobody is forcing you to have it on your phone nor are they forcing you to be part of it" really the standard that we want when judging whether to share our revulsion about a company or product? You're not wrong about that part, I'm just not sure what your point is.

It's no secret that social media in general stokes many of our worst impulses. Citizen strikes me as somewhat unique because it starts from such a negative place and then encourages us to feel worse. Facebook benefited from engagement resulting in political chaos but that's only one of the ways individuals can interact. Citizen can't even claim that weak defense. It's like the social media version of for-profit prisons: it claims to want safety but it benefits the most when we think we are unsafe.

Hate to break it to you but "nobody is forcing you" is kinda the standard in the US from vaccines to social media to guns.

Everything is a choice here. There are plenty of countries out there which would have chosen to ban Citizen along with a whole long list of other even more idiotic things but this country is about freedom of choice even if that choice is bad for the greater community.

Nobody is forcing you to get your license plate scanned by some random with giant plate scanners on his trunk at the grocery store.

If it's anything like the Ring "neighborhood alert" notifications I briefly had on after getting a doorbell: no, not really.

A filtered (only the worst things get reported) dubiously-accurate (lots of "heard something that sounded like gunshots") view of a large geographic area (they sent me stuff covering a much larger area than I would've been concerned of) isn't "the truth of who we are," it's just a window into how some people are feeling, presented by a company that stands to make more money if they can make you feel more concerned.

Oh totally agree that they are bating you into being a frightened animal holed up in your house. So i turn off the notifications and only go on the app if i am bored or if there's something happening locally i want to know more about.

The citizen app is especially egregious but it's not the only app that does this. Unfortunately all social apps that rely on engagement have to create a false perception of the world in order to maximize engagement. The government is not going to regulate the UX design here. It's up to the individual to learn of their dystopian reality.

I personally don't really want to know about every single crime but if I had the choice I would choose for every single crime to be captured on video. You can call it a police state or vigilante state but I'm fine with that.

There's a place just like you're describing — Britain.