6 ms·

Ring provided 100 LAPD officers with free devices to influence adoption

fireball_blaze 5y ago
https://archive.ph/0F08e https://archive.ph/0F08e
smt88 5y ago
All the people who are mad about web tracking violating their privacy should spend 95% of their privacy activism on Amazon. They're building a terrifyingly thorough, 1984-like surveillance network and actively pursuing govt contracts to use it for law enforcement. If you want to create a weapon that could be used to control a populace quickly, it would look a lot more like this (and autonomous drones) than it would a human army.
- bsharitt 5y ago
  Of all the "problematic" web giants, Amazon is probably the one I have the hardest time avoiding just because the value proposition is a so much better. Sure I can find the same products on other website at a similar price, but it's harder to get my money back if there's a problem shipping times are generally much worse. I have Amazon Smile setup to contribute to the EFF, but I'm sure it probably doesn't really make up for it.
  - sharkweek 5y ago
    My experiences with Amazon in the last five years have taken such a sharp turn downward I take every reasonable opportunity I can to shop / do business elsewhere. A huge fear of mine is in 20 years the competitive landscape is so homogeneous that I won’t even have that luxury.
    - pochamago 5y ago
      I don't think you need to be too worried about that, young e-commerce competitors still pop up and seem to do well at taking a slice of the market. Shopify is larger than Amazon for my workplace, and Etsy is definitely getting bigger month by month.
  - diveanon 5y ago
    Opposite experience for me. The amazon marketplace is filled with scams and counterfeits. I would rather pay a little more and get the product from a trusted source, or just go to a local store and buy it.
  - smt88 5y ago
    I don't know if you're in the US, but I've found that traditional, physical-first retailers (Target, Best Buy, Walmart, Bed Bath & Beyond) have all of Amazon's good qualities and none of their bad ones. You can get 2-day or same-day shipping from them now, and you can return directly to their store. They don't do inventory comingling, so you don't have to worry about things like getting bed bugs from sheets you buy or counterfeits. You do lose the massive AliExpress-like selection of nonsense-branded Chinese products that Amazon has, but I find that I don't miss those.
- 8note 5y ago
  I'd think it would look like Fox News.
- Black101 5y ago
  LoL, you must be forgetting about Android and I-Phones devices that have multiple sensors... and what about cars that are connected 24/7?
sneak 5y ago
It's illegal for us non-corporate types to bribe cops. Seems to be permissible when Amazon does it. :(
- Judgmentality 5y ago
  Pretty sure it's illegal for anyone to bribe cops, but it's still a tradition as old as policing.
  - bdcravens 5y ago
    In most places, restaurants aren't allowed to give them free food. (edit: as a commenter pointed out, may be more of a police policy than a legal one) Yet you'll always see restaurants frequented by cops on-duty - guess which ones are breaking those rules.
    - anamexis 5y ago
      Can you give specific examples of laws that disallow restaurants giving cops free or discounted food?
      - bdcravens 5y ago
        Honestly no, other than conversations I've had in various places with people who ran some eating establishments. It may be more of a police department policy, as the other commenter mentioned.
      - kafkaIncarnate 5y ago
        https://jcope.ny.gov/gifts https://jcope.ny.gov/gifts http://www.leg.state.fl.us/statutes/index.cfm?App_mode=Display_Statute&URL=0100-0199/0112/Sections/0112.3148.html http://www.leg.state.fl.us/statutes/index.cfm?App_mode=Displ...
        anamexis 5y ago
        Right, I know there are laws preventing law enforcement from accepting gifts. I was skeptical that there are laws preventing businesses from offering them.
chairmanwow1 5y ago
Gifts are super important for landing big contracts. I've heard a lot of stories about sending VPs Away suitcases or watches to catch their attention and initiate a sale.
- sohei 5y ago
  There is a lot of outright corruption [1] and malfeasance [2] in the surveillance tech acquisition processes. It's probably because that process is so secret. Brandeis was right, "sunlight is the best disinfectant". The strategy seems to be, "run the process in secret and present the result as a fait accompli". It's working. [1] https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndil/pr/former-redflex-ceo-pleads-guilty-corruption-awarding-city-chicago-s-red-light-camera https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndil/pr/former-redflex-ceo-plea... [2] https://www.vice.com/en/article/k7exem/banjo-ai-company-utah-surveillance-panopticon https://www.vice.com/en/article/k7exem/banjo-ai-company-utah...
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
btilly 5y ago
When you have a new product, sometimes people need to be given it to figure out how to use it. A classic example is Post-It notes. It sounded like something that nobody wanted. And it wasn't until 3M gave it to companies for free and found that 90% of them reordered that it began to see adoption. So the fact that a company hands out samples for free may just be a good marketing technique, and not bribery. See https://www.ideatovalue.com/insp/nickskillicorn/2017/04/true-story-post-notes-almost-failed/ https://www.ideatovalue.com/insp/nickskillicorn/2017/04/true... for a random link verifying the Post-It story.
- slipframe 5y ago
  3M's target audience for post-it notes was offices, so they gave them away to offices. Amazon's target audience for Ring is homeowners, so they gave them away to... not randomly selected homeowners. It sounds like they specifically gave them to police.
clircle 5y ago
Old marketing trick. Patagonia and Keen send freebies and coupon codes to their influencers, the forest service.
- iudqnolq 5y ago
  I suspect you're referring to > The Patagonia Pro Program is a membership program for qualified outdoor professionals, environmental grant recipients, and outdoor industry partners. The forestry service is a very strange example to call out because their employees aren't at all prominent and most well-off consumers will visit national/state parks instead of national forests (which are awesome, but much lower profile) so I doubt many of them ever see forestry service people wearing the gear.
throwawaysea 5y ago
I am surprised by the comments here which seem very fearful of Ring. Personally I welcome anything that helps police actually locate and arrest suspects. After all the crime we experience daily in cities like SF and Seattle, I am all for citizens being able to share footage and help the police along. If you don't support that, then you really don't support the enforcement of laws in general - which seems like an argument for crime and/or anarchy. Personally I am not convinced by the slippery slope argument that Ring cameras will lead to broader unrestricted general surveillance. Ring customers can choose to voluntarily share footage with the police, or not - it's up to them. That's not the same as a dystopian ever-present dragnet. And even if we have cameras on every corner run by the government (rather than Ring), we can establish legal controls such as needing a warrant or reasonable suspicion of a crime to examine footage or perform facial recognition matches.
- throwaway0a5e 5y ago
  The reason you have tons of crime in places like SF and Seattle is because of department and DA policy not to pursue these types of crimes even when there's evidence. More evidence doesn't make up for lack of political will.
  - tehwebguy 5y ago
    Right, no matter how many people police assault or even murder there are virtually zero DAs willing to prosecute them. That’s what you are talking about, right? There are of course the extremely rare cases where they’ll pretend to press charges and use a grand jury to get them dropped (e.g. Torgalski & McCabe), and the even more rare case where the murder gains so much publicity that they’ll have to pursue a real case (e.g. Chauvin) or is so incredibly heinous and brutal (e.g. Michael Valva) but by and large police will never face prosecution.
    - redis_mlc 5y ago
      > no matter how many people police assault or even murder That's hyperbole. There's 10 million arrests per year in the US by armed police, and only a handful of fatalities. Having said that, DAs were not doing their job, and police unions are a large part of that. And there has been no progress on the latter. Regarding the George Floyd case, Chauvin will probably get off on appeal because of the political meddling, which went all the way up to the White House.
w0mbat 5y ago
Glock did crazy deals early on, letting US police departments trade-in their existing used guns from other makers for new Glocks at minimal or no cost. Glock could afford to do it because Glocks are cheap to make due to the brilliantly simple design, with a manufacturing cost lower than the resale value of the used guns they were accepting. Soon Glock owned the US police market, and that gave them the credibility to win in the US domestic market at full price.
- fireball_blaze 5y ago
  Surely you aren't comparing people's expectations of a gun manufacturer versus Amazon?

https://archive.ph/0F08e https://archive.ph/0F08e

All the people who are mad about web tracking violating their privacy should spend 95% of their privacy activism on Amazon. They're building a terrifyingly thorough, 1984-like surveillance network and actively pursuing govt contracts to use it for law enforcement. If you want to create a weapon that could be used to control a populace quickly, it would look a lot more like this (and autonomous drones) than it would a human army.

bsharitt 5y ago
Of all the "problematic" web giants, Amazon is probably the one I have the hardest time avoiding just because the value proposition is a so much better. Sure I can find the same products on other website at a similar price, but it's harder to get my money back if there's a problem shipping times are generally much worse. I have Amazon Smile setup to contribute to the EFF, but I'm sure it probably doesn't really make up for it.
- sharkweek 5y ago
  My experiences with Amazon in the last five years have taken such a sharp turn downward I take every reasonable opportunity I can to shop / do business elsewhere. A huge fear of mine is in 20 years the competitive landscape is so homogeneous that I won’t even have that luxury.
  - pochamago 5y ago
    I don't think you need to be too worried about that, young e-commerce competitors still pop up and seem to do well at taking a slice of the market. Shopify is larger than Amazon for my workplace, and Etsy is definitely getting bigger month by month.
- diveanon 5y ago
  Opposite experience for me. The amazon marketplace is filled with scams and counterfeits. I would rather pay a little more and get the product from a trusted source, or just go to a local store and buy it.
- smt88 5y ago
  I don't know if you're in the US, but I've found that traditional, physical-first retailers (Target, Best Buy, Walmart, Bed Bath & Beyond) have all of Amazon's good qualities and none of their bad ones. You can get 2-day or same-day shipping from them now, and you can return directly to their store. They don't do inventory comingling, so you don't have to worry about things like getting bed bugs from sheets you buy or counterfeits. You do lose the massive AliExpress-like selection of nonsense-branded Chinese products that Amazon has, but I find that I don't miss those.
8note 5y ago
I'd think it would look like Fox News.
Black101 5y ago
LoL, you must be forgetting about Android and I-Phones devices that have multiple sensors... and what about cars that are connected 24/7?

sneak 5y ago

It's illegal for us non-corporate types to bribe cops. Seems to be permissible when Amazon does it. :(

Judgmentality 5y ago
Pretty sure it's illegal for anyone to bribe cops, but it's still a tradition as old as policing.
- bdcravens 5y ago
  In most places, restaurants aren't allowed to give them free food. (edit: as a commenter pointed out, may be more of a police policy than a legal one) Yet you'll always see restaurants frequented by cops on-duty - guess which ones are breaking those rules.
  - anamexis 5y ago
    Can you give specific examples of laws that disallow restaurants giving cops free or discounted food?
    - bdcravens 5y ago
      Honestly no, other than conversations I've had in various places with people who ran some eating establishments. It may be more of a police department policy, as the other commenter mentioned.
    - kafkaIncarnate 5y ago
      https://jcope.ny.gov/gifts https://jcope.ny.gov/gifts http://www.leg.state.fl.us/statutes/index.cfm?App_mode=Display_Statute&URL=0100-0199/0112/Sections/0112.3148.html http://www.leg.state.fl.us/statutes/index.cfm?App_mode=Displ...
      - anamexis 5y ago
        Right, I know there are laws preventing law enforcement from accepting gifts. I was skeptical that there are laws preventing businesses from offering them.

chairmanwow1 5y ago

Gifts are super important for landing big contracts. I've heard a lot of stories about sending VPs Away suitcases or watches to catch their attention and initiate a sale.

sohei 5y ago
There is a lot of outright corruption [1] and malfeasance [2] in the surveillance tech acquisition processes. It's probably because that process is so secret. Brandeis was right, "sunlight is the best disinfectant". The strategy seems to be, "run the process in secret and present the result as a fait accompli". It's working. [1] https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndil/pr/former-redflex-ceo-pleads-guilty-corruption-awarding-city-chicago-s-red-light-camera https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndil/pr/former-redflex-ceo-plea... [2] https://www.vice.com/en/article/k7exem/banjo-ai-company-utah-surveillance-panopticon https://www.vice.com/en/article/k7exem/banjo-ai-company-utah...

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

btilly 5y ago

When you have a new product, sometimes people need to be given it to figure out how to use it. A classic example is Post-It notes. It sounded like something that nobody wanted. And it wasn't until 3M gave it to companies for free and found that 90% of them reordered that it began to see adoption. So the fact that a company hands out samples for free may just be a good marketing technique, and not bribery. See https://www.ideatovalue.com/insp/nickskillicorn/2017/04/true-story-post-notes-almost-failed/ https://www.ideatovalue.com/insp/nickskillicorn/2017/04/true... for a random link verifying the Post-It story.

slipframe 5y ago
3M's target audience for post-it notes was offices, so they gave them away to offices. Amazon's target audience for Ring is homeowners, so they gave them away to... not randomly selected homeowners. It sounds like they specifically gave them to police.

clircle 5y ago

Old marketing trick. Patagonia and Keen send freebies and coupon codes to their influencers, the forest service.

iudqnolq 5y ago
I suspect you're referring to > The Patagonia Pro Program is a membership program for qualified outdoor professionals, environmental grant recipients, and outdoor industry partners. The forestry service is a very strange example to call out because their employees aren't at all prominent and most well-off consumers will visit national/state parks instead of national forests (which are awesome, but much lower profile) so I doubt many of them ever see forestry service people wearing the gear.

throwawaysea 5y ago

I am surprised by the comments here which seem very fearful of Ring. Personally I welcome anything that helps police actually locate and arrest suspects. After all the crime we experience daily in cities like SF and Seattle, I am all for citizens being able to share footage and help the police along. If you don't support that, then you really don't support the enforcement of laws in general - which seems like an argument for crime and/or anarchy. Personally I am not convinced by the slippery slope argument that Ring cameras will lead to broader unrestricted general surveillance. Ring customers can choose to voluntarily share footage with the police, or not - it's up to them. That's not the same as a dystopian ever-present dragnet. And even if we have cameras on every corner run by the government (rather than Ring), we can establish legal controls such as needing a warrant or reasonable suspicion of a crime to examine footage or perform facial recognition matches.

throwaway0a5e 5y ago
The reason you have tons of crime in places like SF and Seattle is because of department and DA policy not to pursue these types of crimes even when there's evidence. More evidence doesn't make up for lack of political will.
- tehwebguy 5y ago
  Right, no matter how many people police assault or even murder there are virtually zero DAs willing to prosecute them. That’s what you are talking about, right? There are of course the extremely rare cases where they’ll pretend to press charges and use a grand jury to get them dropped (e.g. Torgalski & McCabe), and the even more rare case where the murder gains so much publicity that they’ll have to pursue a real case (e.g. Chauvin) or is so incredibly heinous and brutal (e.g. Michael Valva) but by and large police will never face prosecution.
  - redis_mlc 5y ago
    > no matter how many people police assault or even murder That's hyperbole. There's 10 million arrests per year in the US by armed police, and only a handful of fatalities. Having said that, DAs were not doing their job, and police unions are a large part of that. And there has been no progress on the latter. Regarding the George Floyd case, Chauvin will probably get off on appeal because of the political meddling, which went all the way up to the White House.

w0mbat 5y ago

Glock did crazy deals early on, letting US police departments trade-in their existing used guns from other makers for new Glocks at minimal or no cost. Glock could afford to do it because Glocks are cheap to make due to the brilliantly simple design, with a manufacturing cost lower than the resale value of the used guns they were accepting. Soon Glock owned the US police market, and that gave them the credibility to win in the US domestic market at full price.

fireball_blaze 5y ago
Surely you aren't comparing people's expectations of a gun manufacturer versus Amazon?