"Amazon Ring's Super Bowl ad offered a vision of our streets that should leave every person unsettled about the company's goals for disintegrating our privacy in public. In the ad, disguised as a heartfelt effort to reunite the lost dogs of the country with their innocent owners, the company previewed future surveillance of our streets: a world where biometric identification could be unleashed from consumer devices to identify, track, and locate anything - human, pet, and otherwise."
"The ad for Ring's "Search Party" feature highlighted the doorbell camera's ability to scan footage across Ring devices in a neighborhood, using AI analysis to identify potential canine matches among the many personal devices within the network. Amazon Ring already integrates biometric identification, like face recognition , into its products via features like " Familiar Faces ," which depends on scanning the faces of those in sight of the camera and matching it against a list of pre-saved, pre-approved faces."
Amazon Ring introduced a neighborhood search feature that scans doorbell camera footage using AI to find potential matches, framed as reuniting lost dogs. The feature, combined with existing biometric tools like Familiar Faces, could enable broad identification, tracking, and location of people and animals across interconnected consumer devices. Some states require explicit consent for face recognition, while others lack such safeguards. Ring has a record of privacy violations, collaborations with law enforcement, microphones that capture street audio, and an FTC settlement over employee access to user data, raising legal and civil-liberty concerns.
Read at Electronic Frontier Foundation
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