Amazon’s plan to turn Ring doorbells into a neighborhood-wide surveillance system was roundly denounced as dystopian even when it was just searching for lost dogs.
The company does at least seem to have learned from the privacy backlash, announcing that it has now abandoned plans for a partnership with police …
Amazon had originally announced a partnership with Flock Safety, a company specializing in automated license plate recognition and other forms of video surveillance. The deal would have allowed police to send requests for doorbell video footage to Ring owners.
The company claims that it has now abandoned this plan because it would require “more time and resources than anticipated.”
The far more likely reality is that the company abandoned its plan after the backlash it experienced when it ran a Super Bowl ad promoting the Ring Search Party feature to help find lost dogs.
Against a backdrop of nationwide protests against ICE operations, viewers quickly pointed out that this laid the groundwork for the feature being tweaked to work against human faces rather than dogs.
ICE has reportedly been using Flock’s license plate database for immigration-related searches.
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Image: 9to5Mac/Amazon/Rawpixel. Via Engadget.
Top comment by Nutmac
Liked by 5 people
The idea isn’t bad, but Amazon’s track record of disregarding user privacy isn’t helping (e.g., EU GDPR violation, Alexa and Ring data retention violation). Their association with Flock Safety has further tarnished their reputation.
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