Citizen is an application that allows people to monitor and participate in public security monitoring and reporting. After several months of testing in Seattle, the application was officially extended to Seattle.
The startup plans to invest more resources of its operations and event handling team in Seattle, which has attracted about 30000 downloads.
This venture backed technology company was established in 2016, with New York as its first market. At present, it operates in more than 60 cities and has nearly 10 million users in the United States. Seattle, as the 15th metropolitan area in the United States, is in line with citizens’ desire to expand their footprint and serve more communities.
Citizen has raised $133 million from supporters including Peter Thiel’s founder fund, Sequoia Capital, greycroft and others.
“We believe in giving people a way to use mobile phones to protect their neighbors, prevent tragedies and rely on each other,” citizens said on their website.
It does this by monitoring events and alerting users to events such as fire, missing persons or criminal activity. Citizen monitors 911 communications, ambulance dispatch, etc. to collect information in real time. Citizen app users within a quarter mile of the event will receive an alert.
Users can click event updates to get more information, watch videos, or view maps to find where to report activity. They can also share videos as part of the community, which are approved by citizen moderators.
Citizen has launched a protection service called “the future of personal security”. Users can pay $19.99 a month to get access to 24-hour “protection agents”. These agents can help upgrade calls to 911, remind your emergency contacts, help you navigate to a safe location, and so on.
Citizen employs more than 200 fully dispersed employees and says it works regularly on the ground in the community where it operates. The company said Seattle would do the same, but did not specify how many people the city might hire.
This week, workers from the citizens’ Union voted to form a union because American communication workers won a majority in the National Labor Relations Council election. Bloomberg reported that among about 90 eligible voters on the negotiating team, 51 voted for the establishment of trade unions and 22 against it.
“Citizen” was criticized for its strategy of “making the user’s world safer”. The main board of the Deputy media reported in May that “the search for a specific arson suspect promoted by the app” in Los Angeles proved that he was an innocent man. The New York Times magazine last week criticized the app, especially the nature of a video of missing children, and the premise of the whole platform: “attract attention and turn the world into a participatory reality show.”