Surveillance Date: An App Lets Friends Listen In on Your Romantic Encounters

The same scene plays out in so many TV shows: A guy wears an earpiece to a date as his friend sits in a phone booth across the street listening in and feeding him some surefire lines. The plan usually fails, due to a wardrobe malfunction, or the bulging outline of obsolete listening apparatus. But nowadays, having your smartphone sitting face-up on the dinner table, chirping interruptions throughout the meal, is an inalienable right. Right?

A new app for iPhone, called Crowdpilot, livestreams that fearful date to your friends so they’ll be able to aid you with constant text-based advice. When you don’t know what to do or say to win her back to your place for "some coffee," Crowdpilot reminds you who knows best: that heroic friend of yours, with nothing better to do than to voluntarily standby and patch your chat remotely with fun and quirky conversation-starters. Crowdpilot’s heartwarming ad, with its generic feel-good indie soundtrack, is by far the freshest example I’ve seen of consumers willfully embracing a gang of eavesdroppers.

Not limiting the concept to play-by-play dating, the app's website also suggests that live listeners spouting on-screen advice could be practical for tackling arguments, consolations, family gatherings, meetings, chance encounters, or any other situation requiring the nuance of human touch that you somehow became an adult without. If you don't have friends that give a shit about your neuroses, the app lets you hire listen-in assistants that "speak English" for $0.99 a pop. I can mostly see a use case in which the date you thought you were going to ace ends up becoming an unsustainable nightmare—and in fidgeting to "debrief" your friends, staring down into your palm of smartphone, you only look up to see an even more puzzled date.

After the past nine months of state surveillance revelations and leaks, it's perhaps surprising to see an app embrace surveillance to such an extent that it suggests an individual might not be successful were it not for an eavesdropper’s attentive advice. Sure, plenty of applications, social media sites, and even gift registries have evolved and encouraged new ways for users to share sensitive materials. But how clever is an app that exploits a non-judgmental campfire spirit to capitalize on that scheming, plotting, insecure teenager that lives deep inside every 30-something who's still never done his laundry? As biological clocks tick, I assume it's either television nostalgia or grave desperation that'll have users downloading such an app.