6 ms·

Why We Don’t Recommend Ring Cameras

51 points by fraXis 3y ago

greazy 3y ago
https://web.archive.org/web/20230709122318/https://www.wired.com/story/why-we-do-not-recommend-ring/ https://web.archive.org/web/20230709122318/https://www.wired...
prepend 3y ago
[flagged]
- jdlshore 3y ago
  That’s facile and dishonest. It has no relationship to what the article actually says.
  - prepend 3y ago
    Fair. My comment was based on Wired’s history of tech guides being pretty useless based on product placement fees received from various companies. Although I have no evidence, my hunch is if Amazon paid Wired, they would have positive coverage in Wired’s reviews.
- egberts1 3y ago
  Very accurate that Amazon does not pay us for the video stream that all of us neighbors’ Ring Doorbell produce.
mjfl 3y ago
what a dystopian article and idea. Homeowners should be prevented from sending Ring video footage to police because there is a risk that these videos might be used to report innocent racial minorities to the police. The presence of this risk apparently outweighs the obvious benefit that one can send videos of real criminals to police. What's next, not being able to call 911? Criminals are victimizers, not victims. It is UNETHICAL to coerce people into not reporting a crime because of perceived identity-politics based risks. It causes increased harm in the world because criminals who escape are free to victimize again, and do. The authors of this article, and editors at Wired, are participating in unethical, immoral behavior and they should be ashamed of themselves!
- beecafe 3y ago
  By that logic, anything that could potentially ever help catch a criminal is worth any potential cost to anyone who isn't you.
  - starttoaster 3y ago
    I think I see where you’re coming from here. Presuming that the police are incapable of performing their job without killing innocent people. We see a lot of that on the tv these days, so I understand your perspective. But if we presume that the police are incapable of performing their jobs, then you’re saying it’s never really worth involving them at all. And that’s an even bigger problem.
    - flangola7 3y ago
      >you’re saying it’s never really worth involving them at all. This is the reality for many millions of Americans. I have people in my own family for whom police interaction of virtually any kind will make their situation worse time. There are neighborhoods and communities where the idea of calling the police and actually expecting to receive help will get you laughed out of the room, as everyone in the room knows from actual experience it isn't true. A third of their local taxes go to a thing that will at best never help them. It isn't by accident that nations have travel advisories warning their citizens about American police.
      - scarby2 3y ago
        So how do we fix the actual problem? A functional police service is a useful thing to have and a moral imperative. American police are sub optimal so we have to stop working with them and get rid of them is a non-sequiter
        flangola7 3y ago
        The idea that policing (or at least anything we would recognize as policing today) is necessary in society is from a universal opinion and certainly has not been the reality for most of human civilization. "Abolish the Police" is not rhetorical. https://archive.ph/6E7mY https://archive.ph/6E7mY
scrum-treats 3y ago
Frontline has a great mini-documentary calling out the very real privacy and trust violations Amazon faces today: https://youtu.be/RVVfJVj5z8s https://youtu.be/RVVfJVj5z8s. - Ring allowing data access to all employees, and to police, without customer awareness. Amazon also created a special interface for police to access Ring footage, at will, in exchange for police departments pushing Ring devices (https://youtu.be/RVVfJVj5z8s?t=4702 https://youtu.be/RVVfJVj5z8s?t=4702). - Alexa as listening devices in very personal and private places, for which Amazon employees can listen and view "for training purposes." Dave Limp is on record explicitly stating this is false; "it's not a listening device." (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVVfJVj5z8s&t=4490s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVVfJVj5z8s&t=4490s) And then ambient intelligence rolls out, right after this interview, where Alexa doesn't actually need a wake word to "hear" requests. See also: Ambient, Proactive Alexa (https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/devices/amazons-new-head-of-alexa-rohit-prasad https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/devices/amazons-new-head-of...). Make no mistake, Alexa is always listening. - Dave Limp also skirts accountability for the "cute indoor Ring device" that was hacked and scared a child to her very core, stating it is an "industry problem" (https://youtu.be/RVVfJVj5z8s?t=4783 https://youtu.be/RVVfJVj5z8s?t=4783). Notice how Dave Limp's eyes dart both in the "Alexa is not a listening device" and in the "we've already investigated that [the Ring hack] to make sure what the root cause was," along with the lip bite in the "Alexa is not a listening device" clip. Following the question on Alexa and Ring contributing to a dystopian Orwellian reality, notice the swallow after Limp states that "he doesn't want to invent the technology that would create that world." And then the dismissal statement of "that world happened before Ring or Alexa." Watching people lie is fun. - Amazon Rekognition (https://youtu.be/RVVfJVj5z8s?t=5002 https://youtu.be/RVVfJVj5z8s?t=5002) uses Ring data as training data. And then markets that to law enforcement. Andy Jassy himself states "with any technology, the people that use the technology have to be responsible for it, and if they use it irresponsibly they have to be held accountable" (https://youtu.be/RVVfJVj5z8s?t=5147 https://youtu.be/RVVfJVj5z8s?t=5147).
PM_me_your_math 3y ago
Shouldn't this be up to the owner of the camera? I don't see any reason why you wouldn't want to report certain activity to police. Let's say a series of cameras in a neighborhood caught a man looking into windows. And the last camera caught the same man breaking into a residence. Would not the other videos help put a criminal in jail? And that's bad? How? The writer at wired doesn't own a home, lives with their parents, or never had someone try to victimize them where they lay their head. Theirs is a naive look at the world though an ideological lense. Something that doesn't exist in the real world, and a view that gets real people hurt precisely because it enables criminal behavior. If we, as a society, tolerated crime less, then we'd have less of it.
- weard_beard 3y ago
  Sounds a bit like you’re projecting. Property crime gets a shrug or a stern lecture on locking your doors. Whatever security measure you took wasn’t enough or the right one. Law enforcement is note taking, victim blaming, homeless harassment, and ticketing. All of which could be done cheaper and without maintaining a dangerous armed militia.
  - KRAKRISMOTT 3y ago
    > Property crime gets a shrug or a stern lecture on locking your doors. And that's the fucking problem. People won't be resorting to technology if the police would actually do their jobs.
    - weard_beard 3y ago
      I don’t argue with people who think more policing will fix poverty. I just see them as having gotten roughed up by different thugs. Ultimately what we’ve got isn’t working and the underlying problems are getting worse. Eventually it’ll fail enough people we’ll pass a tipping point. Might as well start brainstorming
      - scarby2 3y ago
WheatMillington 3y ago
Am I an idiot? I genuinely don't understand the chain of logic in this article, and I'm not being deliberately obtuse here. You shouldn't have the ability to proactively provide data to law enforcement to report possible crime, and the seemingly unconnected reasoning is racism. I'm honestly puzzled by this article, it feels incomplete.
- local_crmdgeon 3y ago
  They don't like that having cameras provides objective evidence of the race of people who commit crime. They recommend against being able to prevent/punish these crimes, because that might be mean.
- guiambros 3y ago
  Maybe I'm being cynical, but the entire article feels like an excuse to have the last two paragraphs with links to their own reviews of "the best video doorbells". All of which are full of affiliate links, of course.
- themacguffinman 3y ago
  It's interesting that so many comments are bewildered at the article's argument - that Ring by default puts too much power in the untrustworthy police - when that's the mainstream argument put forth by privacy advocates on web tracking and data collection, an argument that should be pretty familiar here. Instead of the potential for Facebook/Google/Amazon to abuse your data, it's the potential for the American police to abuse crime reports. Instead of Facebook/Google/Amazon using their data to spy on and manipulate people, it's the police using Ring surveillance to go after minorities. Whenever you read "police" and wonder what's wrong with police access, pretend it's actually talking about data bogeyman "Facebook" instead. Maybe that'll help some folks understand the reasoning here: it's a classic "don't help the oppressors" narrative that becomes more familiar when you put a techie spin on it.
janalsncm 3y ago
If your issue with surveillance camera footage is that it increases the possibility of racial profiling, guess what? You don’t have a problem with Ring, you have a problem with policing. It’s interesting that the article goes on to include an affiliate link listicle with many other doorbell cameras. I wonder how those other cameras managed to disable the possibility of racial profiling.
- zerbinxx 3y ago
  I think the point is that if your home surveillance system encourages you to notify police about about any feels-related issue, then that can add a really nasty edge to your or your neighbors unconscious bias. It’s one thing for me to get freaked out because a black homeless lady comes up on my porch at night, it’s another thing for me to call the police on her. Turns out she’s not actually homeless and is actually very nice and downright hilarious, though she does have drug/alcohol problems. The author does a good job of explaining that it’s precisely the Neighbors software that is the cause for concern here, which is probably why they are less reticent to suggest other brands of cameras which (presumably) don’t have the one-click police video-feed notification button. I will say that it’s not an amazing argument, just that you may be misreading why they don’t like Ring.
  - kelipso 3y ago
    I'd be pretty freaked out if some druggie comes up to my porch at night.. Problem is you call the cops and she has a pretty good chance of getting shot. High school dropout cops doing as they're trained to do.
nateb2022 3y ago
> Why We Don’t Recommend Ring Cameras > They’re affordable and ubiquitous, but homeowners shouldn’t be able to act as vigilantes. > Ring owners [are allowed] to send videos they've captured with their Ring video doorbell cameras and outdoor security cameras to law enforcement. Let's think about this one moment. A "security" camera provides security against what exactly? By definition, crime. Crime is handled by whom? Police. And now homeowners are somehow labelled as "vigilantes" because they can send footage (presumably of crime) to the authorities? How does that even make sense? By definition, vigilantism is law enforcement undertaken without legal authority -- and the police are the very authorities tasked with law enforcement. Labeling homeowners "vigilantes" along this line of thought is a very obvious oxymoron. It is ridiculously absurd that any amount of circumstances should be used as a justification for an attack on such a feature. This Wired staff editor was so determined to write about police reform and social biases that they make an illogical argument that has nothing to do with the Ring cameras themselves. I am not defending Ring, but rather pointing out that this article is both illogical and mistitled. It has nothing to do with Ring specifically and cites no evidence to suggest that the ability to send videos to police -- presumably, crime footage -- increases the likelihood of racial profiling. An argument like this is analogous to an article titled "Why We Don't Recommend iPhones" where the author writes something along the lines of: They're premium and ubiquitous, but people shouldn't be able to call 911... When you set up an iPhone, you're automatically enrolled into cellular service... But it also allows iPhone owners to call 911... We believe this feature should not exist. When we interviewed Apple CEO Tim Cook on steps that his company was doing to reduce racial profiling... et cetera. This is absurd.
local_crmdgeon 3y ago
Ironically this convinced me to buy a Ring camera. "You might pattern match on the people who steal your shit" ok? Then I'd be able to report people who steal my shit? Is this a joke? Am I missing something?

51 points by fraXis 3y ago

https://web.archive.org/web/20230709122318/https://www.wired.com/story/why-we-do-not-recommend-ring/ https://web.archive.org/web/20230709122318/https://www.wired...

prepend 3y ago

[flagged]

jdlshore 3y ago
That’s facile and dishonest. It has no relationship to what the article actually says.
- prepend 3y ago
  Fair. My comment was based on Wired’s history of tech guides being pretty useless based on product placement fees received from various companies. Although I have no evidence, my hunch is if Amazon paid Wired, they would have positive coverage in Wired’s reviews.
egberts1 3y ago
Very accurate that Amazon does not pay us for the video stream that all of us neighbors’ Ring Doorbell produce.

mjfl 3y ago

what a dystopian article and idea. Homeowners should be prevented from sending Ring video footage to police because there is a risk that these videos might be used to report innocent racial minorities to the police. The presence of this risk apparently outweighs the obvious benefit that one can send videos of real criminals to police. What's next, not being able to call 911? Criminals are victimizers, not victims. It is UNETHICAL to coerce people into not reporting a crime because of perceived identity-politics based risks. It causes increased harm in the world because criminals who escape are free to victimize again, and do. The authors of this article, and editors at Wired, are participating in unethical, immoral behavior and they should be ashamed of themselves!

beecafe 3y ago
By that logic, anything that could potentially ever help catch a criminal is worth any potential cost to anyone who isn't you.
- starttoaster 3y ago
  I think I see where you’re coming from here. Presuming that the police are incapable of performing their job without killing innocent people. We see a lot of that on the tv these days, so I understand your perspective. But if we presume that the police are incapable of performing their jobs, then you’re saying it’s never really worth involving them at all. And that’s an even bigger problem.
  - flangola7 3y ago
    >you’re saying it’s never really worth involving them at all. This is the reality for many millions of Americans. I have people in my own family for whom police interaction of virtually any kind will make their situation worse time. There are neighborhoods and communities where the idea of calling the police and actually expecting to receive help will get you laughed out of the room, as everyone in the room knows from actual experience it isn't true. A third of their local taxes go to a thing that will at best never help them. It isn't by accident that nations have travel advisories warning their citizens about American police.
    - scarby2 3y ago
      So how do we fix the actual problem? A functional police service is a useful thing to have and a moral imperative. American police are sub optimal so we have to stop working with them and get rid of them is a non-sequiter
      - flangola7 3y ago
        The idea that policing (or at least anything we would recognize as policing today) is necessary in society is from a universal opinion and certainly has not been the reality for most of human civilization. "Abolish the Police" is not rhetorical. https://archive.ph/6E7mY https://archive.ph/6E7mY

scrum-treats 3y ago

Frontline has a great mini-documentary calling out the very real privacy and trust violations Amazon faces today: https://youtu.be/RVVfJVj5z8s https://youtu.be/RVVfJVj5z8s. - Ring allowing data access to all employees, and to police, without customer awareness. Amazon also created a special interface for police to access Ring footage, at will, in exchange for police departments pushing Ring devices (https://youtu.be/RVVfJVj5z8s?t=4702 https://youtu.be/RVVfJVj5z8s?t=4702). - Alexa as listening devices in very personal and private places, for which Amazon employees can listen and view "for training purposes." Dave Limp is on record explicitly stating this is false; "it's not a listening device." (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVVfJVj5z8s&t=4490s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVVfJVj5z8s&t=4490s) And then ambient intelligence rolls out, right after this interview, where Alexa doesn't actually need a wake word to "hear" requests. See also: Ambient, Proactive Alexa (https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/devices/amazons-new-head-of-alexa-rohit-prasad https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/devices/amazons-new-head-of...). Make no mistake, Alexa is always listening. - Dave Limp also skirts accountability for the "cute indoor Ring device" that was hacked and scared a child to her very core, stating it is an "industry problem" (https://youtu.be/RVVfJVj5z8s?t=4783 https://youtu.be/RVVfJVj5z8s?t=4783). Notice how Dave Limp's eyes dart both in the "Alexa is not a listening device" and in the "we've already investigated that [the Ring hack] to make sure what the root cause was," along with the lip bite in the "Alexa is not a listening device" clip. Following the question on Alexa and Ring contributing to a dystopian Orwellian reality, notice the swallow after Limp states that "he doesn't want to invent the technology that would create that world." And then the dismissal statement of "that world happened before Ring or Alexa." Watching people lie is fun. - Amazon Rekognition (https://youtu.be/RVVfJVj5z8s?t=5002 https://youtu.be/RVVfJVj5z8s?t=5002) uses Ring data as training data. And then markets that to law enforcement. Andy Jassy himself states "with any technology, the people that use the technology have to be responsible for it, and if they use it irresponsibly they have to be held accountable" (https://youtu.be/RVVfJVj5z8s?t=5147 https://youtu.be/RVVfJVj5z8s?t=5147).

PM_me_your_math 3y ago

Shouldn't this be up to the owner of the camera? I don't see any reason why you wouldn't want to report certain activity to police. Let's say a series of cameras in a neighborhood caught a man looking into windows. And the last camera caught the same man breaking into a residence. Would not the other videos help put a criminal in jail? And that's bad? How? The writer at wired doesn't own a home, lives with their parents, or never had someone try to victimize them where they lay their head. Theirs is a naive look at the world though an ideological lense. Something that doesn't exist in the real world, and a view that gets real people hurt precisely because it enables criminal behavior. If we, as a society, tolerated crime less, then we'd have less of it.

weard_beard 3y ago
Sounds a bit like you’re projecting. Property crime gets a shrug or a stern lecture on locking your doors. Whatever security measure you took wasn’t enough or the right one. Law enforcement is note taking, victim blaming, homeless harassment, and ticketing. All of which could be done cheaper and without maintaining a dangerous armed militia.
- KRAKRISMOTT 3y ago
  > Property crime gets a shrug or a stern lecture on locking your doors. And that's the fucking problem. People won't be resorting to technology if the police would actually do their jobs.
  - weard_beard 3y ago
    I don’t argue with people who think more policing will fix poverty. I just see them as having gotten roughed up by different thugs. Ultimately what we’ve got isn’t working and the underlying problems are getting worse. Eventually it’ll fail enough people we’ll pass a tipping point. Might as well start brainstorming
    - scarby2 3y ago

WheatMillington 3y ago

Am I an idiot? I genuinely don't understand the chain of logic in this article, and I'm not being deliberately obtuse here. You shouldn't have the ability to proactively provide data to law enforcement to report possible crime, and the seemingly unconnected reasoning is racism. I'm honestly puzzled by this article, it feels incomplete.

local_crmdgeon 3y ago
They don't like that having cameras provides objective evidence of the race of people who commit crime. They recommend against being able to prevent/punish these crimes, because that might be mean.
guiambros 3y ago
Maybe I'm being cynical, but the entire article feels like an excuse to have the last two paragraphs with links to their own reviews of "the best video doorbells". All of which are full of affiliate links, of course.
themacguffinman 3y ago
It's interesting that so many comments are bewildered at the article's argument - that Ring by default puts too much power in the untrustworthy police - when that's the mainstream argument put forth by privacy advocates on web tracking and data collection, an argument that should be pretty familiar here. Instead of the potential for Facebook/Google/Amazon to abuse your data, it's the potential for the American police to abuse crime reports. Instead of Facebook/Google/Amazon using their data to spy on and manipulate people, it's the police using Ring surveillance to go after minorities. Whenever you read "police" and wonder what's wrong with police access, pretend it's actually talking about data bogeyman "Facebook" instead. Maybe that'll help some folks understand the reasoning here: it's a classic "don't help the oppressors" narrative that becomes more familiar when you put a techie spin on it.

janalsncm 3y ago

If your issue with surveillance camera footage is that it increases the possibility of racial profiling, guess what? You don’t have a problem with Ring, you have a problem with policing. It’s interesting that the article goes on to include an affiliate link listicle with many other doorbell cameras. I wonder how those other cameras managed to disable the possibility of racial profiling.

zerbinxx 3y ago
I think the point is that if your home surveillance system encourages you to notify police about about any feels-related issue, then that can add a really nasty edge to your or your neighbors unconscious bias. It’s one thing for me to get freaked out because a black homeless lady comes up on my porch at night, it’s another thing for me to call the police on her. Turns out she’s not actually homeless and is actually very nice and downright hilarious, though she does have drug/alcohol problems. The author does a good job of explaining that it’s precisely the Neighbors software that is the cause for concern here, which is probably why they are less reticent to suggest other brands of cameras which (presumably) don’t have the one-click police video-feed notification button. I will say that it’s not an amazing argument, just that you may be misreading why they don’t like Ring.
- kelipso 3y ago
  I'd be pretty freaked out if some druggie comes up to my porch at night.. Problem is you call the cops and she has a pretty good chance of getting shot. High school dropout cops doing as they're trained to do.

nateb2022 3y ago

> Why We Don’t Recommend Ring Cameras > They’re affordable and ubiquitous, but homeowners shouldn’t be able to act as vigilantes. > Ring owners [are allowed] to send videos they've captured with their Ring video doorbell cameras and outdoor security cameras to law enforcement. Let's think about this one moment. A "security" camera provides security against what exactly? By definition, crime. Crime is handled by whom? Police. And now homeowners are somehow labelled as "vigilantes" because they can send footage (presumably of crime) to the authorities? How does that even make sense? By definition, vigilantism is law enforcement undertaken without legal authority -- and the police are the very authorities tasked with law enforcement. Labeling homeowners "vigilantes" along this line of thought is a very obvious oxymoron. It is ridiculously absurd that any amount of circumstances should be used as a justification for an attack on such a feature. This Wired staff editor was so determined to write about police reform and social biases that they make an illogical argument that has nothing to do with the Ring cameras themselves. I am not defending Ring, but rather pointing out that this article is both illogical and mistitled. It has nothing to do with Ring specifically and cites no evidence to suggest that the ability to send videos to police -- presumably, crime footage -- increases the likelihood of racial profiling. An argument like this is analogous to an article titled "Why We Don't Recommend iPhones" where the author writes something along the lines of: They're premium and ubiquitous, but people shouldn't be able to call 911... When you set up an iPhone, you're automatically enrolled into cellular service... But it also allows iPhone owners to call 911... We believe this feature should not exist. When we interviewed Apple CEO Tim Cook on steps that his company was doing to reduce racial profiling... et cetera. This is absurd.

local_crmdgeon 3y ago

Ironically this convinced me to buy a Ring camera. "You might pattern match on the people who steal your shit" ok? Then I'd be able to report people who steal my shit? Is this a joke? Am I missing something?