Ring Superbowl Ad Shows Americans How Powerful Surveillance Systems Have Become, Freaks Them Out

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A backlash has developed over an ad that the doorbell camera company Ring (owned by Amazon) ran during the Superbowl about the company’s “Search Party” function. Available since October, the system allows the owner of a lost pet to notify Ring, which then does a search through the video of all their customers (except those who have opted out) for any images of the lost pet.

In the wake of the backlash, Ring and the driver-surveillance company Flock, which is seeking to create a data-centralizing “operating system for police departments,” announced yesterday that they were canceling their agreement to plug their systems together, and Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey wrote an open letter to Ring/Amazon rightly urging the company to discontinue privacy-invasive practices.

Of course finding lost puppies is, viewed narrowly, a good thing that would warm anybody’s heart. But from reported reactions to the ad, it seems to have surprised and spooked a lot of Americans by revealing just how powerful surveillance networks backed by AI have become. Normal people who don't think about surveillance all the time are often unaware of how advances in machine vision and video analytics, together with the centralization of data through a move to cloud processing, are profoundly increasing the power of video cameras.

That power may be applied to puppies today, but where else could it go? Immigration-related searches? Searches for people wearing t-shirts with certain political messages on them? Already, mass AI surveillance networks have been shown to collect vast amounts of data about political messages on bumper stickers and yard signs. And we know that corporate retail camera networks are threatening to coalesce into a giant BOLO network for government and companies.

The Superbowl ad is also wakeup call reminding us that vendors like Ring/Amazon and Google can access your video under most subscription arrangements and that your video is not necessarily under your control. Companies may make promises as to what their policy is on access and sharing (at least what that policy is at the moment, keeping in mind that you may or may not realize when policy changes come in the form of some impenetrable email about a “privacy policy update.”) As a technological matter, however, assuming your data is not end-to-end encrypted, a cloud company 100% has control over it. And, keep in mind that Ring’s leaders apparently see themselves as handmaidens of law enforcement.

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We have written about the threat that in-home internet-connected microphones and cameras can pose to people’s privacy, and how there are three primary threats when you record yourself: the government, the company that provides the device, and hackers. We also addressed the question “should you buy a doorbell camera?” at length in 2019, but the bottom line is that:

1. You should think hard about whether you really need any cameras in or around your house.

1. If you definitely want a camera, it’s far better for privacy to install one that stores data locally on your own computer rather than on some company’s computer.

Data on your own computer can’t be seized by the government without a warrant, and you’re the one who gets to decide whether it’s shared and with whom. Trusting in Ring's policies offers a mere imitation of that level of control.

Of course a company like Amazon’s Ring doesn’t want you to hold your own data. Nobody these days wants to be just a vendor of hardware devices; companies’ incentive is to make money off subscriptions and to leverage the data their devices collect in various ways. An offering like Ring’s “Search Party” is a networked service providing what economists call positive returns to scale. That means that it’s a “moat” for a company like Ring that defends their market share against a new competitor who might come up with, say, better cameras, because such an upstart won’t have a broad network of other customers to leverage for such services. That probably explains why Ring forces customers to pay extra not to use their cloud service despite the fact that cloud services impose costs such as storage on the company. (The cloud license plate reader company Flock is in much the same position.)

Overall, Ring is just one piece of a larger picture: data collection devices owned by both government and private entities, centralized by private companies through cloud services, and subject to AI analysis that makes them far more powerful than they would have been even in the recent past. That all adds up to a frightening potential for abuse and the chilling of our freedom.