When Amazon announced a wider rollout of a surveillance feature to help Ring smart doorbells locate lost dogs, it was immediately seen as a precursor to using the feature to identify people.
That the company did in fact plan to do this has now been confirmed by a leaked email which Ring has admitted is genuine …
‘Dystopian’ Ring Search Party feature
Things kicked off when a wider rollout of a lost dog feature was announced last week.
Amazon apparently thought the world would respond with a collective “awww” when it announced an expansion of its Ring Search Party feature to help find lost dogs, promoted via a 30-second Super Bowl ad (below). Instead, it’s being widely panned as a dystopian move in the current climate.
Since the company has recently rolled out a facial recognition capability for the Ring video doorbell, people drew the obvious and exceedingly short line between surveilling for dogs to surveilling for people.
Public backlash against the feature also led the company to abandon plans for a partnership with police through Flock Safety.
Human surveillance plans confirmed by leaked email
Top comment by Cuban Missiles
I am a huge security and privacy nut. Still, I live in a place where there may be more cameras than people (if I am exaggerating, it's only by a little). So part of me thinks the cat is already out of the bag on this. Still, I agree that giving that much information to a company has serious implications that need to be sorted out before we allow this.
While the extrapolation from dogs to humans was speculation at the time, 404 Media obtained an internal email from Ring founder Jamie Siminoff proving that this was a firm plan (our emphasis in bold).
“I believe that the foundation we created with Search Party, first for finding dogs, will end up becoming one of the most important pieces of tech and innovation to truly unlock the impact of our mission. You can now see a future where we are able to zero out crime in neighborhoods. So many things to do to get there but for the first time ever we have the chance to fully complete what we started.”
The company confirmed to The Verge that the email was genuine.
The New York Times reports that Siminoff has been engaged in an apology tour to try to deal with the PR fallout.
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