The Citizen App Is Out Of Control

Bloomberg. Getty Images.

There's plenty of shameless ways to make money on the internet. Open up TikTok right now, go to the live videos tab, and scroll until you find a man who has meticulously picked the shell off an entire raw egg. Little tiny piece by little tiny piece. He'll be down to the very last one. He'll have his little tiny peeling tool ready to finally finish it off. He'll go in the most dramatic way possible, slowly picking at both sides of the shell, trying to find the perfect angle to pluck it off without popping the inner-egg membrane (or whatever the fuck it's called). You'll stop on the video for a second and think, "Well he's about to pick off the last bit, let me just see what this egg looks like completely picked clean of shell."

But he's never going to pick off that final piece. He just wants you to think he's about to. He's been sitting there edging his viewer for hours. That's how he gets views. People will start sending him real money to encourage him to just fucking do it already. These idiots will keep sending him their money, just begging him to finish the job so they can get on with their lives. There's somebody out there on TikTok doing that for a living.

I guess that's more stupid than shameless. There are much more shameless ways to make money online than that. For example, instead of making egg shelling content, you could take someone else's egg shelling content and use it for content yourself in a blog. You could pull of a massive crypto rug pull, blatantly steal millions of dollars from your fans, claim you did nothing wrong, then take a 200 hour nap. 

Or you could do what the Citizen app does. If you're unfamiliar, the Citizen app is a public safety tool. Users report crimes in real time and Citizen sends alerts to people when something happens in their area.

Wikipedia - Citizen is a mobile app that sends users location-based safety alerts in real time. It allows users to read updates about ongoing reports, broadcast live video, and leave comments. The app uses radio antennas installed in major cities to monitor 911 communications, with employees filtering the audio to generate alerts. The app is currently available for iOS and Android devices in the United States covering over 60 cities, including New York City, the San Francisco Bay Area, Baltimore, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Detroit, Indianapolis, Phoenix, Cincinnati, Chicago, Minneapolis, Saint Paul, and Cleveland.

Here's some quotes from Citizen about Citizen.

"Citizen is a persona safety network that empowers you to protect yourself and the people and places you care about." - Citizen

"Know what's happening so you and your loved ones can stay safe" - Citizen

"Citizen is a force for good in the world." - Citizen

"Your world is safer with Citizen." - Citizen

All of that is true. If you pay for it. Which is a perfectly fine and legitimate business model. Citizen can't keep their business up and running for free. $20.99 per month for Citizen Premium seems a little steep if you ask me, but they can charge whatever they see fit. Nothing wrong with that.

You can even download the app for free and get a watered down version of Citizen. That's what I have. My homepage right now shows me stuff like this. I never use it beyond just clicking around for fun, but I'm sure the free version could be helpful to people in certain situations.

However if you want to see much further details, you have to pay for Premium. Which is still fine to me. I've always thought it's a little odd that the government doesn't provide us with some technology like this for free. Seems like something actually useful they could easily put together for the American people. But whatever. That's a different story.

The shameless part comes in with their notifications. For people like me who downloaded the app to check out the free trial but never paid for premium, Citizen will keep trying to earn your business. In order to do that, they don't offer you any special deals, or give you the occasional free week to test out any improvements they've made since the last trail, or make an effort to show you ways in which their product might be actually useful to your life. Their marketing strategy is to scare the shit out of you

Their go to move is informing you that one of your neighbors poses an immediate threat to you and your family.

"You want to know which one your neighbors is eying your child every time they leave the house? Which neighbor 50 feet to your west is foaming at the mouth to debauch your child's morals? We know who it is. We have information that will keep your child safe. We'll tell you for $20."

They're basically trying to extort your peace of mind. To make you think there's a dangerous person living next door, and you're a click away from learning all about them. Are those people actually threats? Who knows. I'm not defending any of my mystery pervert neighbors, but there's a massive range of different types of sexual assault. Nathan D S. could have had someone tied up in his basement. He also could have slapped the wrong ass in a bar. But regardless, Citizen wants you to think the worst. The Citizen App - A Force For Good, fear mongers to try and earn your business. They want to paint the scariest possible picture in your head so you impulsively fork over $20. Because you care about your kids, right? You'd be a bad parent if you didn't use all the tools at your disposal to keep your family safe. Sex offenders in your area is already public information anyways, but not everyone thinks about that. Not when Citizen App is shoving that information in your face in a neatly packaged way for a small fee.

I got another one today that was somehow even more clickbaity than dangling a predator over your child's head. Having a sex offender next door is at least something people should know about. But the one I got today was such bullshit. I live in Jersey City, so the #1 thing people around here are talking about is the mysterious drones. Car sized drones flying over small towns, cruising over houses, spying on military bases and tracking U.S Coast Guard vessels. Everyone is on high alert about the drones. So of all the crazy stuff that happens in New York/New Jersey on a daily basis. Of all the assaults that happened today. Of all the Rafael S.'s 50 feet away, this is the push notification Citizen sent out today.

God damn! Tyler O'Day is in there! With all the incessant drone news we've gotten this week, Citizen is basically implying there was a terrorist attack. Just yesterday we had a congressman tell us Iran was deploying the drones from a mothership parked off the coast of New Jersey. Apparently that wasn't true at all, but that's the type of stuff that's in people's heads. So when Citizen just comes right out and tells its users a drone has struck The Empire State Building, people are going to think some real shit went down.

And if you want the full report to see if this drone attack is as scary as it sounds, that'll cost you $20. 

Fuck you Citizen app. You can't pretend to be this champion for public safety and then dangle wildly misleading news over people's heads to scare them into giving you money. There was no drone that crashed into the Empire State Building. It was one stray 911 call. If there was a drone, it was someone flying a small personal one. It was certainly not the #1 story of the day that above all else Citizen had to let everyone within 50 miles know about immediately. The sexual assault neighbors is one thing. At least there's a world where those guys could be real threats. But taking one stray 911 call about a nothing incident, but because it involved a drone and people are scared of drones right now push that out to all their users. At that point they're not even pretending to give a shit about people's safety anymore. They're so blatantly shameless about it I almost have to respect it.

Now obviously you can quickly search the internet and fact check any updates like that. That's what I always do. I assume that's what most people who are too lazy to turn off their notifications do. But that's a bullshit money making maneuver from a company that fancies themselves as a company trying to create a safer world. That's bullshit, Citizen app, and you know it.