Crime-reporting App Citizen Accidentally Doxxes Billie Eilish After a Reported Burglary

The crime-reporting app, Citizen, previously known as Vigilante accidentally doxxed pop star Billie Eilish's address after a reported burglary at her home, as per VICE's report.

Doxxing is the act of publishing private information of any particular individual on the Internet.

Reported Burglary at Eilish's Home

On Thursday night, Jan. 7, hundreds of users of the Citizen app received a push notification informing them that police were responding to a Los Angeles 911 call regarding an attempted burglary at a specific residence in the city's Highland Park district.

The alert was updated at 9:41 p.m. PST to include the information that the house belonged to Billie Eilish, as per the police.

According to the analytics that Citizen shares with its users, the notification contained the precise address of the home and was delivered to 178,000 users, and was seen by at least 78,000 people.

The address of the residence in question appears to be the pop star's family home, also made available by celebrity data-scrapping sites.

However, the house is obscured on Google Maps, indicating that the family is at least attempting to retain a minimal level of privacy, and the news organizations that covered the incident withheld the address.

How the Citizen App Works

The Citzen app's primary goal is to persuade users to share recordings and pictures of suspected crimes and police action taking place nearby. However, this goal has occasionally resulted into questionable and detrimental acts.

For instance, CEO Andrew Frame paved the way in May 2021 by enticing Citizen users to take part in a questionable manhunt to track down the individual who started a wildfire in the Pacific Palisades district.

Internal communications from the Los Angeles Police Department indicate that they opted to cool their working relationship with Citizen after the event, which resulted in the corporation placing a $30,000 bounty on the wrong person.

After the incident, Frame expressed some remorse, but Slack messages revealed that he also saw the bounty experiment as a huge net win and a chance for Citizen to start addressing what he believed the government was failing to do, namely protect citizens from the rampant crime he believed to be all around them.

On Citizen, the reported incident's address was immediately modified on Friday morning to refer to a cross-street rather than the precise address. The address was also changed in earlier revisions to a cross-street in place of the original one, according to VICE's report.