“ Fuck snitches , fuck Citizen , fuck Andrew Frame and remember , kids : Cops are not your friends , ” someone on the dark web recently wrote . That same person claims to have scraped and leaked data point from the aforementionedcrime report app — including entropy about some 1.7 million public safe “ incidents ” recorded and cataloged by the company , Motherboard first reported .
Citizen , whose CEO is the colorfully referenced Mr. Frame , functions as a real - time public safety notification system , alerting drug user to suspected criminal activity in their geographical area via police scanner information and drug user - submitted report . lately , the company raised some eyebrows when it announce thatit will launchits own app - based privatized law enforcement service , thereby essentially becomingOmni Consumer Productsfrom Robocop . See our recent coveragefor details .
Its ambitiousness to become a tangible - life dystopian villain source directly from great 1980s science fiction movie has intelligibly not come without some detractors , however . The self - described “ hacktivist ” who snatched Citizen ’s data later leaked it to a website dubbed “ The Concerned Citizen ’s Citizen Hack”—where viewers can now look up all of the filched data : incident GPS location data , associated police radio set audio file , images , issue history , and more . Altogether , it gives an unfiltered , aggregate look at the great amount of information collected by the public condom firm , as well as a windowpane into how the company processes and stores all of that data .
Photo: KIRILL KUDRYAVTSEV/AFP (Getty Images)
This is really just the modish in a string of several information problems the company has weathered . Not only did its chief operating officer recentlyuse bad intelto fault an L.A. homeless serviceman for starting wildfires , but just a few days ago , Motherboard revealedthat the company had in public exposed exploiter data collected via its covid-19 striking tracing feature . The company subsequently patched whatever cakehole had allowed the data to be visible .
Despite how the “ hacktivist ” has qualified it , this latest incident is n’t a “ taxi ” per se — as a lot of the data was already publicly approachable to the app ’s users . Instead , it resemble many of the other recent large - scale grate incidents of late , wherein an actor swoops in to grab large amounts of public - facing information , then yank it out of the lotion and dumps it into one centralised positioning — typically some sort of underworld forum ( see : theFacebookandLinkedInepisodes , for reference point ) .
“ It ’s like a full logarithm of police bodily process in multiple U.S. cities , ” the hacker told the intelligence outlet , suggesting that it could be used to understand how widely the app is being used and how responsive law enforcement is to it . Motherboard reports :
New York had over 520,000 ; Los Angeles over 250,000 , Philadelphia closely 120,000 . The data also designate Citizen ’s use in other city across the country , include Austin , Atlanta , Dallas , Portland , and Flint . The hacker say the New York scraping dates from January 2018 to May 2021 .
When reached for comment , a spokesperson for Citizen called the incident a “ non - story ” and furnish the following statement :
All of this information is in public available on our web site atcitizen.com/explore . Our users distribute these videos to the Citizen residential area to keep their neighbour dependable and informed . Newsrooms across the country use these videos in their broadcast daily . We are majestic of the fact that we moderate every piece of drug user - generated content on our platform , and our team of moderators work around the clock to hide video which do not meet our guidelines .
Translation : I ’m not owned , I ’m not owned , I ’m not have .
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