Citizen, the self-proclaimed crime-fighting app, has launched a brand new premium service that, for $20 a month, enables you to do one thing you may already do totally free.

The firm, whose platform serves as a public security notification system that makes use of push alerts to inform customers about emergency-related incidents of their space (fires, automobile crashes, and suspected and confirmed felony exercise), has launched Citizen Protect, an “on-demand, personalized, mobile protection subscription that gives you 24/7 access to Citizen’s team of highly trained Protect Agents.” What is a Protect Agent, you ask? Frankly, they sound quite a bit like your typical emergency dispatchers—you already know, the sort you get while you name 911, totally free? There are some tweaks, nonetheless.

Protect is actually a customer support suite, by which paying clients will be related to an agent—who then stays on the telephone with them throughout sketchy conditions, or will name “911 on your behalf.” There can also be apparently a brand new “Distress Detection” characteristic that, when engaged, will use your telephone mic to hearken to you and if its algorithm picks up, say, the sound of you screaming on your life, it can join you to an agent. The firm explains it like so:

…your audio is monitored by our AI-powered know-how which identifies sounds that point out bother, like a scream for instance. When a misery sign is recognized, you’ll be requested for those who’d prefer to be related with a Protect Agent. And for those who don’t reply inside 10 seconds, you’ll be routinely related simply in case you’re experiencing an emergency.

According to the corporate, the service additionally gives a “text-only” possibility, which can be utilized in conditions the place a caller “may not want to be seen calling 911.” This is for for those who’re being held hostage or one thing? A Citizen spokesperson supplied the next examples:

We’ve seen Protect utilized in many alternative conditions, whether or not somebody has first date jitters, is getting right into a rideshare late at evening, is in a tough home state of affairs, or is solely feeling unsafe whether or not they’re strolling house alone.

The firm says that it’s launching the brand new service after testing it with 100,000 beta customers, and claims that it’s making an attempt increase, not exchange, already current emergency response companies. Yet as a lot as Citizen wish to persuade Americans that it’s making an attempt to maintain us all secure, it’s simply arduous to look previous its bizarre historical past, or its apparently un-ironic need to change into a fixture of the overly surveilled future none of us truly need to stay in.

When it launched again in 2016, the app glided by the identify “Vigilante”—and its enterprise mannequin was to ask customers to seize and submit movies of horrible issues occurring of their neighborhoods (fires, shootings, and so on). It subsequently acquired a big money infusion and rebranded. In latest instances, it has been on a mission to aggressively increase in any method it might probably—throwing out wild concepts for weird new companies after which continuously backtracking. For occasion, it lately introduced plans—after which subsequently scrapped them—to ship on-demand safety groups to app customers’ neighborhoods, a form of Uber-meets-Blackwater factor that appeared like a very dangerous thought. More lately, it got here to gentle that Citizen has been paying app customers to mainly change into Jake Gyllenhaal’s character from Nightcrawler, deputizing them right into a pseudo-broadcast journalism clique to seize footage of native carnage, in a transfer that alerts a possible curiosity in the local news market.

However, regardless of all these goals of company progress, it’s not completely clear how helpful Citizen’s core public security characteristic truly is. If you hearken to some customers’ opinions, it doesn’t sound that nice: “The one thing I’ll say about this app is that I don’t like it,” mentioned George G, a Los Angeles resident, in his 2019 YouTube review of the app. “It just bombards you with all of this information. A lot of 911 calls are bullshit anyways. So if you want your phone going off nonstop, telling you there’s a shooting or a car crash that was 10 miles away—which is literally, basically on a different planet if you live in Los Angeles—this app is not for you.”