Citizen’s dangerous effort to cash in on vigilantism
In case people are missing the broader point of the article, beyond the horrifying incident at the beginning:"The whole idea behind Protect is that you could convince people to pay for the product once you’ve gotten them to the highest point of anxiety you can possibly get them to," one former employee said, referring to Citizen's subscription service. "Citizen can’t make money unless it makes its users believe there are constant, urgent threats around them at all times,"...Citizen incentivizes both its employees and the public to create incidents because they are the core currency of the app and what drives user engagement, user retention, and a sense of reliance on the app itself...."It’s basically an anxiety sweatshop," a Citizen source said. "On days when things are 'slow,' they relax the standards around incidents because a dip in incident count is really bad," they added. The company sends congratulatory emails announcing which analysts reported the highest number of incidents, another source added....A former employee added, "They don’t much care about the accuracy or the usefulness of the information they put out, they just want to push as many notifications to create that feeling of vulnerability that leads people to the subscription services."