Project Title: SyncSpy
Problems We Are Dealing With: Crimes are one of the major problems almost every city is dealing with but what exacerbates this problem is, it is not getting reported at the correct time. And even if it is reported, actions taken aren’t transparent. People fear that reporting crime might come with an unexpected and undesirable consequence and hence they conclude it better to not to get involved and stay away and even who dare to come ahead for justice face different kinds of unspeakable issues which are hidden from the world including the status of their problem. There is no platform available for backtracking a problem or to give feedback for the services. So, that is exactly where our idea would fit in for a better society!
Excerpts From Our Survey:
- According to a report by IndiaSpend, Despite Law, 70% Working Women do not report workplace sexual harassment. And rest 30% reported being either denied or tried to be suppressed by one means or other.
- According to Legal Beagle Report, Crimes don’t get reported sometimes because people can not make a decision regarding the right authority to be reported so, they end up reporting to school guards or the principal rather than police. Another reason is that in some cases people are afraid of getting ashamed. Also, in the case where people lack credence for the procedure being carried out after the crime has been reported. Also, it is not reported due to the fear of any further mishap.
Introduction: In the aforementioned scenario, technology can come to our rescue since it is one of the harbingers of the Information Age. Today, with the aid of this technology, we can ameliorate the problems stated and also give people the freedom to report such atrocious felonies. Keeping all the points in mind, we come up with an idea of providing an online platform accessible at the fingertips where people can report crimes fearlessly with or without revealing their identity and in addition incorporating transparency in the procedure. Also, it would consist of the option to add location tag and timestamp augmented with a crime report. It would notify the nearby branch of concerned authority so that action can be taken within the time limit.
Objective: We aim to help authority in enforcing ground-level implementation faster than it is in the current scenario. We expect that our platform will be like an assistant to the common people of society. It is a slogan by Police that “be our eyes and ear!”. This app would act as a precursor to make such thoughts prevalent. It will help people cooperate with departments and result in the utopia-like world. For administration, it can serve as an excellent tool for analysis and visualization on different predicates. Different departments that are working against unsociable elements would get a tool that would help them ameliorate their work. This tool will help users discern places which are prone to the different type of attacks and accidents by visualizing data that it receives from other users. Hence, they could remain vigilant of their surroundings during transit. Also, the user reporting authentic report would be given some credits which would show the account’s credibility.
Implementation: For users, the requirement is to register themselves on the app via creating their individual accounts. Users would be asked to enter their basic details at the time of registration. After making an account, users would be qualified to post plights they came across either with themselves or with anyone else in their presence, augmented with the location and timestamp of the infraction. They could post the felony either anonymously or by disclosing their identity, but they would be constrained by a limited number of characters describing the event along with location and timestamp as mentioned above. Your post will be geotagged on the digital map indicating the location of the crime. Crimes could be discerned on the basis of the marker used for geotagging, for assisting users and concerned authorities. Marker color intensity would depend on the time and would gradually get a translucent ending in a semi-lucid state. This encapsulates our Digitally-Geotagged Map.
On the user app, apart from the map, there would be five different tabs.
- Profile
- Post
- Credits
- History
- Statistics
- Profile: This tab would contain the basic details including identification details of the user, and it would give user rights to edit or update it.
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Post: This tab would open a text editor powered by Machine Learning Algorithms for autocompletion of words based on your profile, and crimes currently being posted from other accounts that the app will receive in real-time. Also, the editor would be supported by voice-based recording and speech-to-text in order to help users convey the information more efficiently. Every crime posted will get a unique post number. “Post” would have a set of four buttons termed as follows:
- Send and Notify: The event would be posted online with geotagging at the specific location for other users and concerned authorities to monitor as this button is clicked. Also on clicking this button, the user would alternatively be able to choose from a list of departments to send its report to. This List would be selected using a Machine Learning algorithm which would take as its inputs certain keywords from the posts of the users.
- Signal: This button would provide Acknowledgement to the user in case, the department has acted upon the request made by the user, and None in case the incident is yet to get an acknowledgment from the concerned authorities.
- Ping: This button dictates a higher priority to the event pinged upon. The precondition for this button to be activated shall be that the signal hasn’t reached a state of acknowledgment by the concerned authorities. It might be constrained to the number of times a user can ping events in a certain amount of time.
- Delete: It would give user power to discard the post if they are satisfied by the response or the action taken on their post by the concerned authority.
- Credits: This tab’s output for a certain user would be dependent on the concerned authorities whom the user notified. It would be bestowed by the concerned authorities based on predicates of the truthfulness and precision of the users’ post. Users can view their credit points here, along with their credibility score bar based upon the aforementioned credits.
- History: This tab shows a table which would contain information of events reported such as like post number, credits (corresponding to that post number), and signal (which depicts whether the Acknowledgment was received or None).
- Statistics: This tab would present general statistics received by the app and provide a panel to compare and analyze the crime records under two different distinction: Location-wise, which crime has been most prominent in a certain location and its vicinity; and Temporal, which crime has been most prominent during a certain time duration. Other than this, concerned authorities would be able to detect and decode crime patterns easily due to the aforementioned visualization of crimes on the basis of two distinctions, namely Location-wise Distinction and Temporal Distinction.
Concerned Departments, there would be a web portal for every department to get complaints from registered users and to process them. They have various power and functions according to their respected department. Few of them would be common like as follows and function names are sufficient to describe them.
- Send Acknowledgment
- See Pending Notifications
- Redirect Notification
- Report Spam
- Give Credits to reporter
Diagrams:
Features:
- Our proposed idea would increase the transparency of process between user and department.
- Increase in interactivity would further lead to the development of mutual trust which will help department and public to build mutual trust and understanding.
- Crimes addressing would be easier and faster.
- Apart from development cost, no cost is involved once the software gets ready other than further maintenance and evolution.
- Easy to use by common man as well as department officials.
Tools Used:
| Technology | Stack |
|---|---|
| Android | Java, Kotlin, Firebase |
| FrontEnd | ReactJs, Redux, Redux-thunk, HTML5, JS, CSS3, ES6 |
| Backend | NodeJS, Express.JS |
| DataBase | MongoDB(No-SQL), Dynamo DB |
| Server | Amazon EC2 |
| External Services | Phone Call Service, ElasticSearch, Google Maps API’s |
| Encryption | Whatsapp Encryption |
GITHUB Code Repository: https://github.com/himanshukhosla123/SyncSpy
Team Members:
- Anu Surya
- Himanshu Khosla
Note: This project idea is contributed for ProGeek Cup 2.0- A project competition by GeeksforGeeks.