Citizen Launches a $20 Service You Can Call to Call the Cops - Gizmodo

Protect is essentially a customer service suite, in which subscribers can be connected to an agent—who then stays on the phone with them during sketchy situations or will simply call “911 on your behalf.” There is also apparently a new “Distress Detection” feature that, when engaged, will use your phone’s mic to listen to you and if its algorithm picks up, say, the sound of you screaming for your life, it will connect you to an agent.

When a distress signal is identified, you will be asked if you’d like to be connected with a Protect Agent.

The company says that it is launching the new service after testing it with nearly 100,000 beta users, and claims that it’s trying to augment, not replace, already existing emergency response services.

Yet as much as Citizen would like to convince Americans that it’s trying to keep us all safe, it’s just hard to look past its weird history, or its apparently un-ironic desire to become a fixture of the overly surveilled future none of us actually want to live in.

If you listen to some users’ reviews, it doesn’t sound that great: “The one thing I’ll say about this app is that I don’t like it,” said George G, a Los Angeles resident, in his 2019 YouTube review of the app.