APP STARS IN CRIME DRAMA
Real- life version of crowdsourced sleuth already out, raking in capital
Crowdsourced crime fighting sounds like a great idea — until overeager citizen sleuths wrongly identify an innocent person, creating havoc or worse in that person’s life.
That tension is the premise of a new CBS drama, Wisdom of the Crowd, which premieres Sunday night at 8 p. m. ET.
Actor Jeremy Piven is billed as the lead. But a fictional computer application called “Sophe” actually plays the starring role.
The Sophe app is a not- so- far- fetched crowdsourcing crime fighter. The idea behind it: If the old saying “two heads are better than one” rings true, then imagine what the combined wits of some 325 million people can do. Especially when it comes to catching a killer.
“As you can imagine, it’s complicated,” Piven says. “My character, Jeffery Tanner, is a tech genius who is completely broken. His daughter is murdered, and he thinks they ( put the wrong guy in prison for it). He needs to find the real killer, and that’s his whole world. So he devises, along with his cohorts, a crowdsourcing, crime- solving platform to figure out who killed his daughter.” Sophe is kind of like a digital Ameri
ca’s Most Wanted on steroids. It’s a constantly updating hub where anyone can submit and dissect evidence. Or converge on a suspected killer, livestreaming their every move in a creepy new kind of flash mob.
“It’s a totally dangerous idea,” Piven said. “It’s kind of like this Frankenstein monster — solving, exploring, heightening itself — what can and can’t it do? We’re in some interesting territory, and I think that’s a brilliant fertile premise for any show because that can lead to bad behavior and vigilantism.”
A Sophe- type app — and its accompanying concerns of privacy loss, a mob mentality and the risk of putting people in harm’s way — pretty much already exists today.
Just last week, a somewhat controversial new crime- tracking app called Citizen launched in beta in San Francisco. The app’s parent company, Sp0n Inc., also announced that it raised a $ 12 million Series A round led by Sequoia Capital, early backers of companies including Apple, YouTube and Zappos.
Citizen uses your phone’s location to show nearby crimes on a map and send you emergency notifications in real time. It also lets you livestream video “or share information about incidents via chat, in an effort to promote community transparency,” according to the app website.
A previous version of the app was called Vigilante. When it launched in New York in October 2016, the company introduced it on a Medium post as “a new technology that opens up the 911 system. This information shows up on a map, so everyone can choose to avoid potential danger, or broadcast the incident live when it’s safe to do so.”
Apple pulled the app down shortly after the launch, which some attributed to criticism that it could promote vigilante behavior and put users in harm’s way. When it relaunched in New York in March of this year, with the new name “Citizen,” the company wrote another Medium post, with a renewed promise to “reinforce our focus on safety.”
“More apps like Citizen are probably inevitable,” Joseph Jerome, policy counsel with the Center for Democracy & Technology, wrote in an email. “Policing in the United States is an incredibly complicated, contentious, and resourceintensive issue. If Citizen really is about the public interest mission it claims, it will need to work to create a culture that isn’t exploitative or irresponsible.”
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