Citizen, the self-proclaimed crime-fighting app, has launched a new premium service that, for $20 a month, lets you do something you can already do for free.
The companys regular platform is a public safety notification system that uses push alerts to tell users about emergency-related incidents happening in their area (fires, car crashes, criminal activity, etc). Now, however, it has launched its paid service, called Protectdescribed as an on-demand, personalized, mobile protection subscription that gives you 24/7 access to Citizens team of highly trained Protect Agents. What is a Protect Agent, you ask? Frankly, they sound a lot like your typical emergency dispatchersyou know, the kind you get when you call 911, for free? There are some tweaks, however.
Protect is essentially a customer service suite, in which subscribers can be connected to an agentwho then stays on the phone with them during sketchy situations or will simply call 911 on your behalf. There is also apparently a new Distress Detection feature that, when engaged, will use your phones mic to listen to you and if its algorithm picks up, say, the sound of you screaming for your life, it will connect you to an agent. The company explains it like so:
…your audio is monitored by our AI-powered technology which identifies sounds that indicate trouble, like a scream for example. When a distress signal is identified, you will be asked if youd like to be connected with a Protect Agent. And if you dont respond within 10 seconds, youll be automatically connected just in case youre experiencing an emergency.
According to the company, the service also provides a text-only option, which can be used in situations where a caller may not want to be seen calling 911. This is for if youre being held hostage or something? A Citizen spokesperson provided the following examples:
Weve seen Protect used in many different situations, whether someone has first date jitters, is getting into a rideshare late at night, is in a difficult domestic situation, or is simply feeling unsafe whether theyre walking home alone.
The company says that it is launching the new service after testing it with nearly 100,000 beta users, and claims that its trying to augment, not replace, already existing emergency response services. Yet as much as Citizen would like to convince Americans that its trying to keep us all safe, its just hard to look past its weird history, or its apparently un-ironic desire to become a fixture of the overly surveilled future none of us actually want to live in.
When it launched back in 2016, the app went by the name Vigilanteand its business model was to ask users to capture and post videos of terrible things happening in their neighborhoods (fires, shootings, etc). It subsequently got a large cash infusion and rebranded. In recent times, it has been on a mission to aggressively expand in any way it canthrowing out wild ideas for bizarre new services and then frequently backtracking. For instance, it recently announced plansand then subsequently scrapped themto send on-demand security teams to app users neighborhoods, a kind of Uber-meets-Blackwater thing that seemed like a really bad idea. More recently, it came to light that Citizen has been paying app users to basically become Jake Gyllenhaals character from Nightcrawler, deputizing them into a pseudo-broadcast journalism clique to capture footage of local carnage, in a move that signals a potential interest in the local news market.
However, despite all these dreams of corporate growth, its not totally clear how useful Citizens core public safety feature actually is. If you listen to some users reviews, it doesnt sound that great: The one thing Ill say about this app is that I dont like it, said George G, a Los Angeles resident, in his 2019 YouTube review of the app. It just bombards you with all of this information. A lot of 911 calls are bullshit anyways. So if you want your phone going off nonstop, telling you theres a shooting or a car crash that was 10 miles awaywhich is literally, basically on a different planet if you live in Los Angelesthis app is not for you.