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Amazon Ring went from a smart doorbell company to a surveillance network
- mtgx 7y agoIs Ring the scariest surveillance company here, or is it Amazon? Ring: - company bought by Amazon Amazon: - tracks you online - tracks you and records you in your home - has contracts with the CIA and the police - sells facial recognition and other surveillance technologies to law enforcement - buys Ring, a rising video surveillance company ... "and you'll never guess what happened next!"
- egdod 7y agoI assume that’s what most IoT devices ultimately are.
- shadowgovt 7y agoIoT is susceptible to the same "cloud / personal" tradeoff as most computing these days. You can roll your own home server and home network, but then you're responsible for maintaining and upgrading (and, most importantly, securing) it.
- AWildC182 7y agoIt's staggering how little the average person on the street cares about these issues. My friend is a software dev and when I asked him why he got a Ring knowing full well how intrusive the system could be, he shrugged and said "Well, can't be worse than my Alexa"
- chung411 7y ago"Pastor Troy Randall, who lives in northwest Baltimore, said that his neighborhood has been “held hostage” by drug sales and associated violence." This is people taking a trade off. Security for Privacy slider.
- homonculus1 7y agoNo, it's convenience for privacy. There are plenty of ways to surveil your own home without networking the footage into police databases. It's just that you have to put a little effort in or pay someone else to set it up.
- r00fus 7y agoFor some people (dual income), it's more than convenience. As iPhone/AppStore proved, the trade off is time/skills. If you don't have the time or skills, and you wouldn't trust a local installer to set everything up right, you really don't have that option.
- Nebasuke 7y agoI think this is indeed a key point often missed in the conversations here. Just because there's a better (privacy) alternative, it still requires a time investment to find one. The alternative will likely require another time/skill investment over the marketed product to actually install it. When you're in a situation where time is scarce, like dual income, kid, etc, you clearly are optimising for other things than privacy or even money spent.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- themagician 7y agoThe average person doesn't care about these issues because for the average person no issue exists. If you initially pitched Ring as a device that was directly connected to the local police department MORE people would buy it, not less. In the 90s, monitored home security was a booming business. The average person wanted it but couldn't afford it. People would pay thousands for an installation and thousands more per year to have someone monitor cameras and call the police if there was an issue.
- sylens 7y agoPeople don't care as much about a camera outside the house. They'd rather catch package thieves and car break-ins
- autoexec 7y agoI'm guessing they just haven't thought about how much a camera on their door tells others about them. How often they come and go, what they wear, who they are with, how often they order food, the age/race/sex of every person living there, etc. It's a massive look at their lives just as much as a camera in their living room would be.
- criddell 7y ago> How often they come and go, what they wear, who they are with, how often they order food, the age/race/sex of every person living there, etc. It's a massive look at their lives just as much as a camera in their living room would be. What's the downside of that? Is it worse than using a phone with lots of Google software on it?
- autoexec 7y agoWhat's the downside to having a amazon camera in your bathroom or bedroom recording what you do? If you don't care at all about your privacy it doesn't matter. If you are concerned with the massive surveillance and data collection amazon and google does it would make sense to try and limit the amount of data you hand over to them. The idea that simply owning a cell phone invalidates any effort or incentive to try to keep the personal details of your life from any company ever is deeply flawed. We all make trade-offs and must decide for ourselves what amount of data we're comfortable handing over to companies who profit from surveillance capitalism. Personally, I can install a camera without giving amazon data about me. I can't get a cell phone that doesn't leak information to google or apple (although I can try to limit what I use my cell phone for and what data those devices leak)
- criddell 7y ago
- multibit 7y agoMany people actually think that connecting a Ring to the local police is a good thing. Someone even announced this as a great feature at our department wide standup the other day. Was kinda shocked, but how can I be the guy to go against having more safety? All everyone wants is more safety.
- UnFleshedOne 7y agoNext best alternative is automated turrets. Just have to get the image recognition right.
- josteink 7y agoRing is made by Amazon? I had no idea, and I have one. Should I be embarrassed?
- arthurgibson 7y agonot at all, amazon acquired them. its a little different from the start, similar path to Nest and Dropcam for google.
- Aaronstotle 7y agoAll IoT devices are corporate botnets, I still don't understand why people install them in their homes. Alexa/Google assistants provide very little value for the user and give companies a microphone into your private life.
- mensetmanusman 7y agoOur kids have so much fun with Alexa. Helping 5-year olds spell words and check math homework, play classical music (learning composers) and dance music, tell stories, etc. It’s like a fun and useful version of a radio.
- whatusername 7y agoGot some suggested skills/etc for the kids?
- mensetmanusman 7y ago‘How do you spell’, ‘play tchaikovsky‘, ‘tell me bedtime story’, ‘what is %X + %Y’, ‘what is the weather’ Recently the 3 and 5 year old have had fun trying to turn on Alexa without saying Alexa (because we told them to stop using it to randomly play baby shark without asking...). Ah lek ah
- yeswecatan 7y agoNot defending them, but so do cell phones.
- Mirioron 7y agoBut cell phones provide a lot of value. It might not necessarily be vital value, but it certainly makes people's lives significantly better.
- chinigo 7y agoFor me, the cost/benefit ratio of cell phones far exceeds that of Alexa/Google Assistant/etc. Also, there's a well-established framework of laws governing under what conditions and by whom your telephone conversations can be monitored. For Alexa/GA, you're at the mercy of the TOS.
- factotum 7y agoIt's interesting how the article accuses Ring and Amazon of selling via fear, but that's also exactly what the article itself is selling. I live in Albuquerque. We have Ring cameras, and I feel so much safer when I leave town. We caught someone rifling through our pickup truck a few weeks ago and were able to correlate it with other reports in the area so that if/when these thieves are caught, they'll go away for longer. Why did I decide to buy these cameras? We were subject to a massive burglary a couple of years ago in which we lost $30k worth of valuables. There are always downsides to every security-related thing, but I highly appreciate the ability to better police my own property, and I bet a bunch of other people feel the same.
- citilife 7y agoI think the point a lot of other people make, is that you can simply use another camera network that doesn't sell your data, centralize it, and share with 3rd parties without your knowledge or [knowledgable] consent. I have a camera system that is similar, I set it up myself, and I could do exactly what you suggested. All without also telling amazon my neighbor goes to-and-from their house 6 times a day (because my door camera faces them). Or that my daughter comes home from school at 3pm.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- Thriptic 7y agoYou set your camera system up yourself. A lot of people aren't going to be willing or able to do that if we are being real. Do you see the average person wiring up a bunch of cameras or troubleshooting networking, configuring a DVR, standing up a web server to view things, setting up off site backups, ensuring their cameras don't go down if power is lost, configuring mobile alerts, etc? People want a plug and play solution. At least systems from Google and Amazon will probably be reasonably secure so they won't get roped into the next botnet when their owners forget to change default creds.
- dbalan 7y ago
- just_steve_h 7y ago"Went from?" No. Has always been.
- 0xCMP 7y agoYep, always been their goal. Get them on every door in a neighborhood so you can have eyes everywhere and crowdsource constant surveillance. Listen to older podcast episodes on Twist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=puP_D3k7vVI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=puP_D3k7vVI
- taurath 7y agoIt comes down to data ownership. If my recordings of outside my home are “mine”, then police can’t get it without a warrant. Amazon certainly shouldn’t be able to access anything without my full consent. In that case, I don’t see any reason it’s different than a closed loop system.
- shadowgovt 7y agoPrecisely. Most of the controversy about Ring is the risk that the data is being accessed without user consent by parties hostile to the user's best interests, not that the device collects the data at all. In general, people bought the device to collect this data (for their own use).
- shadowgovt 7y agoWasn't Ring always a surveillance network, just one that changed who has access to the surveillance data? A "smart doorbell" with a camera is a surveillance device.
- cbdumas 7y agoThe only clear moral breach I can find in this article is the questionable assertions of Ring cameras reducing crime. This is definitely wrong if Ring does not have any evidence of the truth of these claims and they should stop doing that. Everything else, to me, can be boiled down to the fact that the author is uncomfortable with the tradeoffs people are making between privacy and security. The author engages with this point only in passing, at the very end of the piece: "But for ordinary people, like those in Northwest Baltimore, the reason for trusting Ring is simple: they are scared. Pastor Moore said that he understands concerns that people have about Ring’s use of data. However, he said his community didn’t share these concerns."
- jessriedel 7y agoYea. I can't figure out why the "Law Enforcement Neighborhood Portal" is supposed to be so terrifying. It lets police see which addresses have Ring cameras running so the police can request footage directly from a nearby resident when there's been a crime in the neighborhood. I can't tell if I'm supposed to be afraid because this leaks the bit of info that the resident own cameras, or because police might get the footage "without a warrant" by, horror of horrors, asking the resident for it: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/43kga3/amazon-is-coaching-cops-on-how-to-obtain-surveillance-footage-without-a-warrant https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/43kga3/amazon-is-coaching...
- jabedude 7y agoAre there any other products as convenient as Ring/Blink?
- Spooky23 7y agoEufy. Battery powered wifi camera, with encrypted storage on an SD card in your home.
- jesalg 7y agoEufy also offers a wired doorbell with local storage. It was also on sale for $99 over Thanksgiving weekend so I got one to try it out.
- flurdy 7y agoNest [1][2]. Have a very similar product suite of hardware to Ring + Blink [3][4][5]. All under the Google Nest brand. [1] https://nest.com https://nest.com [2] https://store.google.com/us/category/connected_home https://store.google.com/us/category/connected_home [3] https://store.google.com/us/product/nest_hello_doorbell https://store.google.com/us/product/nest_hello_doorbell [4] https://store.google.com/us/product/nest_cam_outdoor https://store.google.com/us/product/nest_cam_outdoor [5] https://store.google.com/product/nest_cam_iq_outdoor https://store.google.com/product/nest_cam_iq_outdoor
- alchemism 7y agoI have a Ring and live on the edge of a seriously bad urban district. Many people in the bad 'hoods have Rings also, so I get notifications as part of the surveillance network. The network is both a fascinating source of local news and -- more to the point -- a surprisingly-valuable tool for people who live in places that the police ignore (or don't have the resources to protect). Once the 'guy who steals Amazon packages' has his face on camera in the act of stealing a package, and someone on every block in a 2 mile radius knows it, it makes his life on the street that much less fun. The community can police itself with tools like this.
- bernierocks 7y agoMany don't realize that we really only have two options for protecting yourself and your family: 1) A weapon, like a gun 2) a camera Sure, we have the police, but by the time they arrive, it's usually after the fact and not easy to actually catch the person that did it. Many countries, like Australia and England, have terrible gun rights, but essentially have turned into a surveillance state in its place, with the number cameras. It puts the fear into thieves because they know they will most likely be caught. If you reject both, it will only result in more innocent people getting hurt or killed and crimes going unsolved. I have ring cameras inside and outside my house. A group of 3 people broke into my house while I was on vacation. They saw the camera inside, and ran out of the window they broke through. Nothing was taken, but if I didn't have the cameras, something would have been taken. On top of everything, this all happened about 5 minutes before my brother-in-law came back home for the night. Cameras have also shown us all sorts of crime we would never have known: package thieves, trespassing, and just a better general awareness we never had before.
- vorpalhex 7y agoYou can surrender all of your liberties, and not actually end up any safer. People are scared, and being scared, want to do something - and going through baggage checks, installing cameras, scanners, pat downs - well that all feels like doing something. Of course, it's not really, it's theater.
- factotum 7y agoOur cameras have helped us identify the person who broke into our car a few weeks ago. That is not theater.
- vorpalhex 7y agoDid you get back your items? Was the person arrested and charged appropriately? My neighbors have posted many reasonably clear, useful images of break-ins and shared them with the police. It has done no actual good - no items recovered, no perpetrators dissuaded.
- justicezyx 7y agoMaybe blockchain can help with this: https://www.iotex.io/securehardware https://www.iotex.io/securehardware
- vorpalhex 7y agoA blockchain would help about as much as changing the endianness or translating it to Cantonese, which is to say it has literally no bearing on the problem whatsoever.
- comunekate 7y agothis is great in that you could apply it to like 75% of blockchain projects I read about and it would work just as well. Still a cool data structure though
- silverfox17 7y agoCould you provide some insight on why you think blockchain would be applicable here?
- EETruth 7y agoBlockchain is sooo 2017 keep this crap in the past, please.
- takeda 7y agoSlightly offtopic, but it's getting harder and harder to get a surveillance equipment that's not connected to "the cloud" all I want is to be in full control of my own data. I would install Ring if it was closed loop system. Same thing with other technologies to make a smart home. Why so many people (especially the ones that understand technology) seem to be ok with this? This attitude causes that there are less and less options for privacy conscious people.
- redwall_hp 7y agoRaspberry Pis + cheap USB webcams or the camera module would work. (The official Pi Zero case has an optional faceplate with a cutout for the camera, so it can all go in one box.) There are existing software packages that can start taking pictures and run scripts when motion is detected.
- slap 7y agoSoftware like motioneye (motion detection) doesn't work on Rpi as it needs a lot of CPU (my experience).
- tonylemesmer 7y agoI agree. It’s flaky at best. Not one to rely on which is kind of a necessity for a security product.
- rasz 7y agopassthrough recording uses hardware acceleration on pee
- newnewpdro 7y agoWorks fine on my rpi zero w cams, I have a bunch of them in use, they've proven very reliable: PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND 437 cam 20 0 120072 23352 15156 S 12.8 6.2 41:56.21 motion 3417 regusr 20 0 8128 3272 2748 R 1.6 0.9 0:00.55 top 37 root 1 -19 0 0 0 S 0.6 0.0 1:39.16 vchiq-slot/0 191 cam 20 0 59000 20040 9852 S 0.6 5.3 2:04.44 meyectl 2334 tun 20 0 9180 4948 4404 S 0.3 1.3 0:00.97 ssh 3398 regusr 20 0 11512 3780 3036 S 0.3 1.0 0:00.11 sshd 3404 root 20 0 0 0 0 I 0.3 0.0 0:00.09 kworker/u2:1 3418 root 20 0 0 0 0 I 0.3 0.0 0:00.04 kworker/0:2
- goldcd 7y agoI waded through those articles - and whilst I don't like the idea of 'cameras' everywhere, didn't actually spot the alluded to smoking gun that was going to blow the whole conspiracy open. Obviously aspects like "black people getting reported as suspicious" is unwelcome, but this isn't a problem with Ring/cameras. I presume the people clicking the suspicious button are the same people traditionally calling in 'tips' whenever they spot somebody with a tan. (Or if you're in the middle of Baltimore it's black residents reporting black people being suspicious). But - I've no real idea/evidence, so I'll leave that. What did appear to be deliberately misconstrued, was the police being directed to reach out on social media to their residents, to improve residents opting in to share their footage. If "the government" asks me to provide a video-feed, my hackles would go up. If your local cop says "I'm trying to reduce crime near you and your footage would help me" - well.. am I going to tell them I'm not going to help?
- aaroninsf 7y agoThe answer depends a lot on what your personal view of the police is and vice versa. Of broader interest: the neighbor agreed to "help" and your family's movements are henceforth subject to surveillance without consent.
- goldcd 7y agoAgreed. Wouldn't want the camera in my home, or pointed at me whilst I work - but I'm OK with "me walking by" Basically, I've accepted the neighbour is already allowed to see me as I walk by - this is just improving the efficiency of surveillance, not changing it. I wouldn't have objected if they'd decided they wanted to start an old-school "twitching curtains" neighbourhood watch scheme - I might not have joined, but I wouldn't be feeling violates.
- ve55 7y agoAnything that is prefixed with 'smart' generally already is a surveillance network
- geddy 7y agoI'm a pretty paranoid guy about Big Brother and the surveillance state and what-not. That being said, I got a Ring to try it out. I got it at a huge discount and figured, if I don't like it, I'll sell it. I actually love this thing now - by far the best feature to me is how I keep on top of neighborhood happenings. I live in a nice part of down but, like many "nice parts", it's right around the corner from a not-so-nice part of town. Package stealing, particularly this time of year, is rampant, and the first time I installed the app I was able to see all of these local reports near me and watch footage of people stealing packages. This is a HUGE deterrent as soon as word gets out that certain houses are "bugged". I think about it from this perspective and immediately think of the "giving up liberty for safety" quote, but I refuse to have any speakers _inside_ of my home. The camera is pointing out towards the street, in broad daylight, in public. I like knowing when my dog walker shows up, when packages arrive, and of course when someone down the block sees a random guy trying to break into cars parked on the street. Overall, I'm conflicted over it, but I'm reminded several times a day (when the thing goes off) that it's a _huge_ convenience to me, particularly as we have expensive packages delivered multiple times per week. As long as I own the data and police don't have default access to it, I'm cool.
- whatshisface 7y agoYou could find a porchcam that connects to a computer you own instead of one that uploads the video to someone else's computer.
- WaxProlix 7y agoDo you own the data? Do the police have access to it? What about Amazon or their partners? Starting a post with a sentence about how you're a paranoid guy and dislike Big Brother and what-not, and then pivoting to spend multiple paragraphs on how you live in a nice neighborhood and don't mind providing data and surveillance on those around you feels more than a little disingenuous. Despite (because of?) being an Amazon employee, though one who works nowhere near the Ring, I'd never buy a Ring - and I don't exactly think I'm the most "paranoid guy" about "the surveillance state and whatnot". Isn't the whole point of the article that the corporate-cop partnerships which are budding here seem distinctly dystopian? Why post all of these positive aspects which -- ostensibly -- exist in competitors (Arlo, maybe?) without the shady downside?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- TurkishPoptart 7y agoI didn't see anyone mention Wyzecam here. https://wyze.com/ https://wyze.com/ Their models start at $20, the smartphone app is very well done, and you can configure it to record events under various conditions quite easily. Can anyone comment on Wyzecam's data security policy? AFAIK there's no cloud feature that lets it interact with other Wyzecams, and I like that.
- Kalium 7y agoWyze definitely has some cloud integrations. There's a notification and remote viewing system and it will send recordings to the cloud. There's also a feature that allows people to choose to share recordings publicly. To most users these things are features, not bugs.
- tylergetsay 7y agoCan't comment on Wyze themselves but these cameras are easily loaded with a custom firmware that can disable all cloud functionality.
- g_sch 7y agoI see a lot of comments here saying that users are buying Rings because they like them, so clearly there must be a need for them. However, in the US, crime rates have nationally been on a downward trend for decades now. Meanwhile, around 60% of people think crime rates are increasing [0]. This is why I'm uneasy with the idea that we should allow revealed preferences to make decisions about the level of ambient privacy we have in US society. There's clearly something pushing people to buy these things, and it isn't a higher crime rate. [0] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/10/17/facts-about-crime-in-the-u-s/ https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/10/17/facts-about...
- trophycase 7y agoMaybe crime is decreasing but the streets still barely feel safe to walk at night depending on where you are. The homeless problem seems to be getting worse though I'm not sure the statistics back it. The difference between walking around at night in Japan, China, and even Europe compared to the US is night and day honestly.
- sys_64738 7y agoMy wife says we'd never ever let any hardware from Amazon inside the house. Now that's outside too.
- dhd415 7y agoI have a Ring doorbell which works great, but I put in a fake street address when registering it for this reason. So far as I've seen, it loses none of its utility from that. The only user-visible feature based on the address is the "neighborhood crime alerts" feature which I don't want since I live in a dense enough city that petty crime "near" me isn't really a concern.
- ravenstine 7y agoIt's fortunate that people are too lazy to either change the batteries or plug in these devices. When I was driving for GrubHub last year in LA, I'd say about 1 in 10 Ring doorbells actually worked. Surveillance sucks.
- ausjke 7y agoYou simply can not find a camera without clouding service attached these days. As long as this camera is networked, it can call-home via wireless or wired network, even though you disabled its cloud service.
- PHGamer 7y agoerr it was always supposed to be for surveillance. people wanna know whos walking by their house and stealing their amazon packages. Everyone acts like this is new but that is the entire point of ring.
- proc0 7y agoI actually don't see a problem with this. There would definitely be a need for products that facilitate police response. Now hopefully there are also products that have all the tech and also respect your data, however connecting to local law enforcement is at least very useful for businesses. They often need to monitor sidewalk activity and such, and even indoors businesses have no problem being transparent to law enforcement. Obviously if you want to monitor your baby don't buy this, or any third party cloud solution for that matter.
- heavyset_go 7y agoAmazon is giving deals to local governments to roll out Ring doorbells, but part of the deal is that they can't imply that what Ring does is "surveillance" Kudos on the title for that reason alone.