Crime and neighborhood watch app Citizen put a bounty on an innocent man, unfairly using his name and image in a failed attempt to catch a suspected arsonist as it tried to grow its vigilante business at the cost of individual privacy.
The incident highlights how some technology companies, including Citizen, attempt to take justice into their own hands and create an unhealthy environment of fear and anxiety in order to lure users in and then offer them services to ‘protect’ themselves, Motherboard reported.
Earlier this month, Citizen’s CEO Andrew Frame pushed the company to offer a $30,000 reward for any information that could lead to the arrest of an arsonist who started a wildfire in Los Angeles.
The app had just launched a new livestreaming service called OnAir to try and catch criminals on the air while tens of thousands of users watch.
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Citizen used faulty information it obtained about the innocent man and framed him as an arsonist on its livestream for many hours, sending almost 850,000 of its users in Los Angeles notifications encouraging them to hunt for the man.
“FIND THIS F***,” Frame told his employees over Slack, according to Motherboard. “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.”
Ultimately, the Los Angeles police arrested the arsonist, but it wasn’t the man Citizen had accused, put a bounty on, and promoted for many hours on its platform.
Citizen was first launched as an app called “Vigilante” in 2016 as a company focused on alerting people to a crime as it happened and then using the crowdsourced intelligence of its users to try and stop the crime without needing the police to interfere.
Citizen’s business model is built upon incentivizing its own employees and the public at large to create and report as many potential criminal incidents as possible in order to engage current users, lure new ones in, and create a sense of reliance on the platform’s services in order for a person to feel safe.
The company has faced multiple accusations of its product creating racism, unhealthy fear, and unfair vigilantism in its attempt to grow its business from tracking down and filming crimes as they occur.
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Academics who study the role of technology within crime detection say apps like Citizen can make problems worse by heightening people’s anxieties and encouraging them to take the law into their own hands, perhaps unfairly or illegally.
