Ring door bells have become the wide spread defacto option for those looking for a camera doorbell. Recently though, there has been a major backlash against the Amazon subsidiary, as they aired a Superbowl commercial promoting what they called the “search party.” This feature is intended to enable AI-powered searches for pets by utilizing multiple individuals’ Ring cameras. This may seem initially like a nice feature, but it has some serious privacy considerations.
According to the EFF Ring, past practices of constantly capturing microphone data, in combination with their very open sharing with law enforcement makes this feature to find people’s pets a first step towards expanding human surveillance. In addition, at the time of the ad, they were working on implementing a data sharing infrastructure with flock safety, who happen to be one of the largest private surveillance camera operators in the US. This would have greatly expanded law enforcement surveillance in the United States.
These concerns were justified as a leaked email from the CEO about the feature revealed that he believed that this feature would lead to “crime free” neighborhoods. This confirmation of plans for mass surveillance made a lot of people uneasy. Thus, there has been widespread disapproval of this feature by privacy advocates.
The partnership with Flock was eventually ended with both companies citing technical incompatibilities as the primary reason for a mutual ending of the partnership. Ring has stated that no data was ever shared.
So for now at least, Ring cameras do not have any human tracking features, but the potential remains in the future.
