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Ring cancels its partnership with Flock Safety after surveillance backlash
- minimaxir 8mo agoWhich Super Bowl LX ads haven't backfired yet?
- ramuel 8mo agoThe Anthropic one? Although I'm sure they'll put ads into claude eventually
- rwc 8mo agoEarly audience response suggested the message struggled to land. According to an iSpot survey of 500 viewers, the ad’s likeability score placed it in the bottom 3% compared with Super Bowl ads over the past five years. Its top-two-box purchase intent scored 24% below Super Bowl norms and 19% below ads in its category that aired over the last 90 days. Viewers most commonly described their reaction as “WTF,” signaling confusion around both the message and the execution. https://www.adweek.com/brand-marketing/super-bowl-revealed-ai-messaging-crisis/ https://www.adweek.com/brand-marketing/super-bowl-revealed-a...
- FarmerPotato 8mo agoThe worst one I remember was "Gerbils" by outpost dots com , a Super Bowl ad with a gerbil cannon. But opinions differ on that one.
- SrslyJosh 8mo agoI think that the ideas of AI boosters and other tech maximalists will pretty much always "struggle to land" with normal people. (See also: the ring ad.)
- noduerme 8mo agoI think what mostly came across was "welcome to the next crypto bubble".
- ryandrake 8mo agoI don't think "normal people" especially run-of-the-mill office workers, like the idea of AI or want it to succeed. Not that it's going to stop Silicon Valley from ramming it down everyone's throats.
- crote 8mo agoOnly when the underlying product sucks. "Here's how the Torment Nexus is going to torment you - subscribe now!" is never going to be a popular message because it is actively making the world worse. People aren't being luddites or not understanding innovation. They know perfectly well what is being sold, and they hate it. Contrast it with the Dotcom bubble, where people mainly thought it wasn't for them or that they didn't need it. Look at interviews of people back then, and the services advertised are at worst described as "unnecessary": you would've had very little trouble convincing them that there would be some market for them. But with those extreme AI examples? Normal people understand it, and they hate it.
- crote 8mo agoThe Anthropic ads are heavily into the uncanny valley. The services they are demonstrating looks horrible - even before the ad. A soulless psychiatrist who'll give you generic cookie-cutter advice about deeply personal issues? Why would you want that!? Same with the personal trainer, the startup coach, and the professor. Any of them would be incredibly creepy in real life, with their fake smiling, uncanny repeated stock phrases, and fake positivity. They are trying to spin it like the integrated ads are the problem, but the services are too far detached from genuine human behaviour for that to matter. "Our creepy ripoff psychiatrist doesn't have ads" isn't exactly a great message, is it?
- krackers 8mo agoAside from the ads/no-ads, they're also trying to lampoon chatgpt (especially the "sycophantic" 4o style), since Claude is supposed to be a more "human" LLM (or at least Anthropic likes to think so given their focus on constitutional rlaif, "soul doc" and whatnot). But it's not a good ad when the only people who will get the reference are those plugged into "ai twitter". But association by implication doesn't work, the only thing most people will end up associating is the creepy guy with "Claude"
- tzs 8mo ago> But it's not a good ad when the only people who will get the reference are those plugged into "ai twitter". But association by implication doesn't work, the only thing most people will end up associating is the creepy guy with "Claude" It might also work for people who watch "South Park". I've never used any LLM speech interface, and until recently had only ever asked ChatGPT short one off questions and so had never seen the sycophantic tendencies, but immediately recognized the creepy people in the ads were supposed to represent ChatGPT from its portrayal in the South Park episode "Sickofancy" from August of last year.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- mh2266 8mo agopokemon?
- dredmorbius 8mo agoFor someone out of the loop, which ones have backfired, other than Ring/Flock?
- vgeek 8mo agoSpiderman pointing at Spiderman?
- dgxyz 8mo agoThe tech industry is a bloody Spider-Man pointing orgy at this point.
- culi 8mo agoThe success case for much of silicon valley seems to be government contracts. Gov't is the polite way of saying military
- RupertSalt 8mo agoDaily Struggle over two buttons labeled "RECOVER LOST PUPPY" and "DEPORT NEIGHBORS"
- bagels 8mo agoIs it a struggle for them? Clearly they're pressing both buttons.
- hikkerl 8mo ago[flagged]
- lovich 8mo ago[flagged]
- hikkerl 8mo ago[flagged]
- donkeybeer 8mo ago
- RupertSalt 8mo agoNow whenever the cameras detect a lost dog, all your neighbors' phones begin playing "Angel" by Sarah McLachlan
- throwway120385 8mo agoThey also play this when the cameras in your house detect you using more than one square of toilet paper at a time.
- dgxyz 8mo agoThis is a temporary rollback while there’s a choice to speak against it. Cloud connected doorbells must die as well as dragnet surveillance.
- ProllyInfamous 8mo agoI worked in large union data centers, decades ago. Cannot even imagine what is going on these days, inside & out.
- ohyoutravel 8mo agoCan you elaborate? This is interesting
- ProllyInfamous 8mo agoI worked across several facilities and obviously cannot talk specifics about those. It is public knowledge that one of them housed a large metro area's main ISP "meet-me room." During Snowden revelations I'd already been apprenticing for years; nothing Edward documented surprised me. I'd literally walk around our 500,000sqft elevated floors knodding my head [none of this exists, officially]. ---- Nothing is as it seems. ---- During DEF CON ~XX~ (approximately same timeframe as story above) it was publicly revealed that intelligence communities had redefined the word "intercept," to mean when a human operator catelogs a certain piece of data/traffic (i.e. not algorithms sorting). #1984 #newspeak #elevenyearsago ---- I no longer carry a cell phone. Don't use email. PO Box in profile
- dgxyz 8mo agoYeah well aware of that stuff here. Two companies I worked at had entirely airgapped infrastructure because they knew the adversarial situation wasn't winnable. Everything was checked for implants at goods in. It's shocking some of the shit that goes on. I run grey man where I can. Stuff that's private stays private. Paper and physical security is still good.
- roganp 8mo agoI hope everyone will remember how eagerly AMZN's subsidiary was willing to sell it's cameras to whomever was willing to pay.
- murillians 8mo agoMeaning they’ll wait until about June and then quietly roll it out
- ToucanLoucan 8mo agoYep. Anyone got alternatives? I love the convenience of a video doorbell but I really really would like to not help the police or ICE or anyone else for that matter unless I decide it's a good idea.
- dgxyz 8mo agoWe've got an analogue video phone on our apartment. Works flawlessly. No digital path other than the ring selection. Has a flat monochrome CRT which is kind of cool. I made it half a century without a doorbell in my phone. I don't need it now.
- kstrauser 8mo agoEh. I have a Logitech Circle View, and appreciate seeing whether it's a delivery person or some rando selling vacuum cleaners. It also pops up a picture of the person on our TV and chimes my phone, so even if we have the music up or we're not at home, we can still see that someone's there. I like these.
- andrewxdiamond 8mo agoyou can use a company that is self hosted like Unifi and have complete control over your data, still have remote access, and not pay a subscription. “self hosted” scares people off but its literally a box you plug in and forget about. Pretty trivial. I dont understand why anyone chooses Ring when the costs of Unifi are so much better. The ring app also sucks imo and all their hardware is quite slow.
- bagels 8mo agoHonestly, that commercial convinced me to dump my Nest cameras because, eventually (if not already), they'll do the same.
- nipperkinfeet 8mo ago[flagged]
- bwoah 8mo agohttps://archive.is/oRWYE https://archive.is/oRWYE
- mandeepj 8mo ago“Canceled” for now. Maybe it was just a video, they’ll continue with the “quiet” development and slowly launch it
- BatteryMountain 8mo agoDefinitely this. Now way they are saying no to that bag (and/or gag orders....). This isn't over.
- sneak 8mo ago> Following intense backlash to its partnership with Flock Safety, a surveillance technology company that works with law enforcement agencies, Ring has announced it is canceling the integration. Ring (owned by Amazon, who runs a private airgapped AWS region for the CIA onsite at Langley) also works with law enforcement agencies.
- mrcwinn 8mo agoAn aside: The Verge’s paywall is ridiculous, especially given that they still live off slimy affiliate revenue and ads that run directly counter to their own editorializing. Their smugness and superiority given their business model makes me wish we had better alternatives.
- donohoe 8mo agoThe writers and editors don’t dictate how the business side monetizes the content.
- alehlopeh 8mo agoA lot of you won’t want to hear it but HomeKit + iCloud secure video is the only way to go. For one thing it’s end to end encrypted. You can also do ML stuff like face recognition which happens locally on your Apple TV. And you can set it to trigger HomeKit scenes if eg the person in the video isn’t recognized, or if it recognizes a particular person. Yeah Apple bad, blah blah. But they don’t have an incentive to sell your data.
- willio58 8mo agoAnd there’s no subscription right?
- righthand 8mo agoIcloud subscription.
- righthand 8mo agoApple totally sells your data, they just anonymize it first. Why do you think they shifted towards services? They also can give the Feds access to your iCloud data through a NSL. Just like Prism.
- mwambua 8mo agoDo you have evidence of that?
- donohoe 8mo agoCitation needed
- macki0 8mo agoiCloud data can be end to end encrypted (https://support.apple.com/en-gb/108756 https://support.apple.com/en-gb/108756)
- Schiendelman 8mo agoiCloud Home video data is ALWAYS e2ee, even without using that setting.
- SilverElfin 8mo agoToo little too late. I’m cancelling prime and returning my ring camera, even past the return deadline. Andy Jassy funded that Melania documentary and is generally a spineless oligarchic friend of the Trump administration. Amazon is basically anti constitutional.
- s0a 8mo agoFrigate NVR + Amcrest cameras. 100% local, private, on-device AI object recognition and classification. Can use a Google Coral USB TPU to speed that up. Runs on hardware as modest as a Raspberry Pi.
- idle_zealot 8mo agoGreat. Now package that as a plug-and-play product so more than 1000 nerds will use it instead of participating in the largest dragnet in history ;)
- geerlingguy 8mo agoThis is only half the problem. The other half, at least for Ring doorbells, is making it easy to get push notifications when button pressed, with instant two-way connection for chatting through the camera. It's already hard enough as a "certified homelabber" to get these things set up and running.
- ryandrake 8mo agoI've found Reolink to be pretty much plug and play. Totally local. The NVR itself has PoE ports so all you have to be able to do is run a long ethernet cable.
- nijave 8mo agoI like Tp-Link Tapo for plug and play. They have some battery/wifi models that last quite a long time you mount with a magnet which is great for a temporary setup.
- GaryNumanVevo 8mo agoSecurity systems used to be 100x the cost (parts+install) before the cloud because you essentially needed a local NAS and to run a bunch of PoE enabled ethernet to each corner of your house.
- lstodd 8mo ago
- dabinat 8mo ago> Following a comprehensive review, we determined the planned Flock Safety integration would require significantly more time and resources than anticipated. That doesn’t sound like “we’re cancelling this because our customers let us know loud and clear that they were ethically against this”. If the only thing keeping them from doing this is time and money, what guarantee do we have that they won’t do it again if time and money allow?
- idle_zealot 8mo agoYou seem to be taking the company's words at face value and assuming good faith. I would caution against doing that.
- riversflow 8mo agoAmazing how often people do that. Corporations have very little incentive to be truthful and often have good reason to be dishonest. I notice it particularly wrt video games, gamers are always taking studio’s messaging as gospel and not corporate comms.
- direwolf20 8mo agoAnd with Elon Musk! If he says we're going to Mars, then we're going to Mars. If he says full self driving next year, we're getting full self driving next year. He said that every year for 10 years? So what?
- ponector 8mo agoI see this all the time at work. Folks treat their relationship with employer like a personal relationship. Be loyal to company and it will be loyal to you. But everyone lies. Your managers will stab you in the back and throw to the ditch anytime they can gain something from it.
- andwur 8mo agoOne needs to only witness an exec team or board meeting to realise that loyalty as a concept doesn't exist at the top for the vast majority of companies. You're 1.8% of the accounts department budget, or 0.02% of the head office budget. Which is looking a bit high in the face of our projected earnings this quarter. Best get HR to trim that by 10% to free up some cashflow for sales and initiatives. Actually, make that 20%. Bonuses were a bit thin last round and I need a new yacht.
- dakolli 8mo agoDoesn't matter, I've come to the conclusion I'll never buy into one these networks. There's a reason "security" cameras were always on "closed circuit", there's no need give these companies money.
- add-sub-mul-div 8mo agoSame. The first thing I did when I bought my house was remove the Ring doorbell.
- noduerme 8mo agoI've had a couple Ring cams for years. I hate the network, hate having to pay for the cloud storage, I've just been too lazy to research self-hosted alternatives. Is there solution you'd recommend that's relatively polished and easy to use?
- Cerium 8mo agoIt is not really cheap, nor best "value for the dollar", but I am extremely satisfied with UniFi [0]. Nearly instant setup, decent mobile apps, web interface, basically just works as you need. [0] https://ui.com/ https://ui.com/ Edit, update link.
- noduerme 8mo agoThank you, that looks pretty good! I think the link should just be ui.com. The subdomain redirects to a login page.
- devStorms 8mo agoUniFi device traffic is not E2EE, they technically can do the same to your video data if you enable remote access (necessary for some of their camera functionalities). https://www.reddit.com/r/Ubiquiti/comments/18j3bac/psa_if_you_enable_remote_access_ubiquiti_can_view/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Ubiquiti/comments/18j3bac/psa_if_yo...
- bandrami 8mo agoI still don't understand how otherwise sensible people can have an Alexa or Google Home. Like what part of that seems like a good idea to them?
- croes 8mo agoConvenience. Same with AI, the same people who fought against Google and Microsoft‘s data collecting now throw everything on data but the kitchen sink at their AI services.
- bandrami 8mo agoThis is such a weird thing to wrap my head around. I don't even use Bluetooth.
- tokioyoyo 8mo agoAbility to “Hey Google, play Spotify” in every room and shower is pretty great. That’s literally the only reason I’ve been using it for 5+ years. Oh, and it was practically free.
- ulrikrasmussen 8mo agoThis is still unthinkable to me. Trading that much privacy for a little bit of convenience? How does it not make you uncomfortable to know that every conversation in your house is live streamed to someone else's computer?
- mlrtime 8mo agoWhat privacy am I giving up? You start with all these judgement questions without explaning.
- Ylpertnodi 8mo agoYour personal privacy.
- hollow-moe 8mo ago"Instead we'll partner with Fluck Security, a young and small company with 0 employee which surely has no ties to Flock Safety:TM:"
- Johnny555 8mo agoThis should be a wakeup call for users of all cloud connected cameras that once they send their video to the cloud provider, they have no real control over how it's used. Ring does support end to end encryption (which disables most of the cloud features), but users are still at the mercy of Ring to trust that it really is e2e encrypted and not the "fake" end to end encryption that some marketers have used to mean "Well it's encrypted from your end all the way to our end where we decrypt it". I don't trust that Ring doesn't have a law enforcement toggle to break the e2e encryption on demand if the police ask for it.
- Schiendelman 8mo agoNot ALL cloud connected cameras. Be careful saying things like that, there are large differences in the trust levels between them. For instance, if you're using homekit, I believe Apple doesn't even have the keys to the e2ee encryption, regardless of your "icloud advanced security" mode.
- fragmede 8mo ago*In the US. They had to disable that feature on the UK because the laws say they can't do that there.
- Schiendelman 8mo agoSince writing this comment, I learned that the homekit secure video feature is e2ee by default regardless of that feature. You can't even turn it off. Apple doesn't have the keys.
- Johnny555 8mo agoI stand by what I said -- If you don't control the software stack, you have no control over whether or not your footage is available to the cloud provider (or law enforcement) no matter what the provider says. As I said in my post, you really don't know if they have a secret software toggle that disables e2e encryption for law enforcement demands.
- elric 8mo agoOver in my neck of the woods, these cameras are illegal when they point at the street. They should also be accompanied by a clearly visible sign indicating the presence of a security camera. Of course no one gives a fuck, and they're sadly ubiquitous. Police love them. Complaints about illegal monitoring are just ignored. I've said it before and I'll say it again, but the 21st century main mode of operation is Distrust. We are constantly, actively fostering distrust in our neighbours and communities. Everyone is constantly suspicious of one another. When in reality the vast majority of us are very well behaved.
- ruhith 8mo ago[dead]
- Steltek 8mo agoIs it really "got caught" if you run a Super Bowl ad? And put out a press release.
- zombot 8mo agoBut only for a few days. The scandal will be forgotten next week, and then they'll reinstate the partnership.
- aroheir 8mo agoI think a "mood mesh ring" for Kotlin DSLs or Amazon Ring integration is an interesting concept,(e.g., "You seem stressed - verify this doorbell notification is important")? Or a Soul weight diet plan?
- moralestapia 8mo agoI've never browsed the Flock Safety website [1]. >1:58pm Police coordinate takedown >2:00pm Suspect apprehended What a complete joke, lol. 1: https://www.flocksafety.com/ https://www.flocksafety.com/
- baggachipz 8mo agoHow long until Flock is a nationally toxic brand? They're just as bad, if not worse, than Ring. Difference being they're not a consumer brand I guess, but far more pervasive in everyday life.
- Noaidi 8mo agoThe more wwe talk about Flock with our friends the faster t will happen. I like just pointing them to https://deflock.org/ https://deflock.org/ for a start.
- jofla_net 8mo agoHey Flock, show me all toyota tacomas with a Raiders sticker who have passed any check point, in the last 35 minutes.... I dont even care about the license plate.
- cmiles8 8mo agoAmazon knew exactly what they were doing… they’re just scrambling because they got caught and underestimated the public backlash from their actions. They made a calculated decision, and calculated wrong. Every tech savy person I know is working up plans to rip these things out and go with solutions that have more rigorous privacy controls. For example the UniFi setups keep all your data on prem so you can avoid these scenarios where some company decides “maybe users won’t mind if we just start using the data for something else” games. The fact that the backlash comes after spending millions on a Superbowl advert to promote the offending tech and use case is a pretty epic “own goal” by Amazon. I have security cameras, and have always voluntarily shared footage with relevant authorities when there was a valid need, but that’s a decision for me to make, not some corporation.
- petiepooo 8mo agoWhat I don't understand is how they get blindsided by the public's reaction. Do they not have high-powered PR teams to do market research? Or did they fire them when they came back with news that the self-centered execs didn't want to hear?
- cmiles8 8mo agoAmazon’s leadership culture is pretty low EQ and they often fail to see things that others would find fairly obvious. The Amazon Go stores and “Just Walk Out” were a good idea on paper but terribly executed because Amazon leaders didn’t understand how customers think and the awkward aspects of the design. Same with the palm reader tech they just scrapped. Similar here where someone thinks this is a good idea but is completely out of touch with customer mindsets. It’s a recurring pattern for Amazon.
- BlackjackCF 8mo agoThe moment I heard about this feature coming out, I bought Reolink cameras with microSDs for local storage and a giant SSD for NVR. I was worried it would be a lot of work to replace Ring stuff. While Reolink’s setup experience isn’t quite as smooth, it was still trivial to get working. Highly recommend it for everyone who wants a decent alternative.
- wiseleo 8mo agoNothing prevents them from having another meeting unless there's an act of Congress to do so.
- petiepooo 8mo agoRequired reading: "The Circle" by Dave Eggers. Skip the movie; the ending sucks and there's too much drama. The book neatly lays out how little steps towards a better life (like being able to find your lost dog) lead to an oppressive surveillance state. Every step is a good thing and makes logical sense. The end result is not good.
- noIdeaTheSecond 8mo agoPeople need to understand the power they have through their wallets
- intellirim 8mo ago[dead]