Citizen Volunteer ‘Safe’ App Accidentally Docks Singer Billie Eilish

Citizen, the provocative crime-reporting app formerly known as Vigilante, is in the news again for all the wrong reasons. On Thursday night, it exposed singer Billie Eilish, exposing her address to thousands after an alleged robbery at her home.

Shortly after the break-in, the app notified users of the break-in in the Highland Park neighborhood of Los Angeles and gave them the address of the house.As reported by Vise, the citizen’s message was updated at 9:41 p.m. to indicate that the house belonged to Irish. Alerts were sent to her 178,000 people and viewed by nearly 78,000, according to Citizen metrics. On Friday morning, Citizen updated its app description of the incident, replacing the exact address with a nearby crossroads.

Home addresses of celebrities are often publicly available (usually on shady websites dedicated to such invasive nonsense), but the home address of one of pop music’s biggest stars. A popular app that pushes to thousands of users is… new. Unfortunately, this is also the latest potentially disruptive move from Citizen.

When Citizen launched as Vigilante in 2016, Apple quickly removed the title from the App Store based on concerns that it encouraged users to put themselves in dangerous situations. So with a new focus on safety and rebranding as Citizen, Apple reopened its gates. The app began advising users to avoid ongoing incidents while providing tools to help those in dangerous situations. That sounds reasonable, but at least one episode reveals an overzealous company that prioritizes care and profit over social responsibility.

In May 2021, CEO Andrew Frame ordered the start of a live stream urging app users to hunt down suspected wildfire arsonists (with tips from an LAPD sergeant and residents interviewed by police). email). He offered a $10,000 bounty to find the suspect, which increased to $30,000 by the evening. , reportedly urged the team to “catch this guy by midnight” in an ecstatic all-caps message.

When a staff member warned the team in a Slack chat that they were violating the app’s terms of service, the staff member was ignored. When police announced they had been arrested that night, the team celebrated, believing their frenetic search for attention had led to the arrest. Citizens had the wrong person. In his Frame’s apparent zeal to arrest high-profile citizens to justify the app’s purpose, he imposed a public bounty on wrongfully accused suspects.