CWN(CHANGE WITH NEWS) - Are public safety apps properly protecting users?

Smartphones have become indispensable to our daily lives. With numerous apps, many are glued to their smart devices. Apps let us enjoy entertainment features; some of them teach foreign languages. Among many other apps, safety apps are one of the most useful apps for most users.

A textbook example can be found in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The city is notorious for gun violence. The endless wars against gun violence, led by the local government and police, still fail to tackle the crimes, let alone reduce casualties. But, Rio found a smart solution to protect citizens from gun violence: a smartphone app called Fogo Cruzado.

Per WIRED UK, the app sends notifications whenever gun violence is inflicted across Rio. With the apps’ notifications based on users’ self-reports, citizens can avoid dangerous places while traveling the city, noticing whether there’s a shooting around their locations.

Most users in Rio are satisfied with Fogo Cruzado. Many citizens in Rio, particularly in favelas, are vulnerable to gun crimes. Shootings take many citizens’ lives every year. But, the app prevents the rise of casualties caused by gun violence.

But, not all apps, developed for public safety, are helpful. Unlike Fogo Cruzado, some safety apps face criticism against users and experts. Citizen, a startup headquartered in Los Angeles, launched a safety app that allows users to report crimes from brushfire to burglary.

If anything, the startup’s crime-tracking app has faced fierce criticism, showing chronic issues that can be found on surveillance technologies.

As reported by NBC News, Citizen collaborated with a private company that provides “subscription law enforcement”. But, with the cooperation, Citizen’s app used users’ location data, collected by cell phones to alert potential crimes around them, leading the startup to be embroiled into the controversy over invasion of users’ privacy.

Moreover, the information on the app is not reliable. False reports are partly to blame. All users can post videos on the app that show reported crime scenes at real time, but it occasionally delivers wrong information, doing nothing to protect app users’ safety.

Racism is another factor that tarnished Citizen’s reputation. Some users of the app falsely report information about suspects of crimes. Citing Matthew Guariglia, a policy analyst of Electronic Frontier Foundation, CBS reported that Citizen’s app generated some profiles against non-whites, linking them with crimes.

Though Citizen had ditched the pilot program with the app, no one can deny the app hasn’t improved citizens’ safety at all. Rather, it risked entrenching the racial stereotypes, though the app itself initially intended to ensure citizens’ safety.

Like all kinds of technologies, safety apps, regardless of their intentions of development, also can be double edged swords. Still, many are disputing over the safety apps: some suggest that the apps are absolutely needed to protect citizens, especially in crime-ridden areas; Privacy activists, however, argue that the collection of location data under the name of safety violates privacy.

Public safety is important. But, nothing is allowed to undermine privacy, even under the name of public safety. To address the privacy issues over a safety app, a transparent privacy policy is needed. And, an app can let users learn more about how their data has been used by issuing a regular report about an app’s data collection.

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