Ring provided 100 LAPD officers with free devices to influence adoption

https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/story/2021-06-17/ring-influencer-marketing-los-angeles-police-department

69 38 5 years ago

smt882• 5 years ago

All the people who are mad about web tracking violating their privacy should spend 95% of their privacy activism on Amazon.

They're building a terrifyingly thorough, 1984-like surveillance network and actively pursuing govt contracts to use it for law enforcement.

If you want to create a weapon that could be used to control a populace quickly, it would look a lot more like this (and autonomous drones) than it would a human army.

bsharitt• 5 years ago

Of all the "problematic" web giants, Amazon is probably the one I have the hardest time avoiding just because the value proposition is a so much better. Sure I can find the same products on other website at a similar price, but it's harder to get my money back if there's a problem shipping times are generally much worse. I have Amazon Smile setup to contribute to the EFF, but I'm sure it probably doesn't really make up for it.

sharkweek• 5 years ago

My experiences with Amazon in the last five years have taken such a sharp turn downward I take every reasonable opportunity I can to shop / do business elsewhere.

A huge fear of mine is in 20 years the competitive landscape is so homogeneous that I won’t even have that luxury.

diveanon• 5 years ago

Opposite experience for me.

The amazon marketplace is filled with scams and counterfeits.

I would rather pay a little more and get the product from a trusted source, or just go to a local store and buy it.

smt882• 5 years ago

I don't know if you're in the US, but I've found that traditional, physical-first retailers (Target, Best Buy, Walmart, Bed Bath & Beyond) have all of Amazon's good qualities and none of their bad ones.

You can get 2-day or same-day shipping from them now, and you can return directly to their store. They don't do inventory comingling, so you don't have to worry about things like getting bed bugs from sheets you buy or counterfeits.

You do lose the massive AliExpress-like selection of nonsense-branded Chinese products that Amazon has, but I find that I don't miss those.

8note• 5 years ago

I'd think it would look like Fox News.

Black101• 5 years ago

LoL, you must be forgetting about Android and I-Phones devices that have multiple sensors... and what about cars that are connected 24/7?

sneak2• 5 years ago

It's illegal for us non-corporate types to bribe cops. Seems to be permissible when Amazon does it.

Judgmentality• 5 years ago

Pretty sure it's illegal for anyone to bribe cops, but it's still a tradition as old as policing.

bdcravens4• 5 years ago

In most places, restaurants aren't allowed to give them free food. (edit: as a commenter pointed out, may be more of a police policy than a legal one) Yet you'll always see restaurants frequented by cops on-duty - guess which ones are breaking those rules.

defaultname2• 5 years ago

It's a enormous stretch to call it bribery. Amazon isn't asking the police to look the other way. They aren't encouraging anything unethical or a breach of trust. Any more than a free laundry soap sampler in the mail is bribery.

Should the police have regulations about this sort of gift? Should, they probably do, and those that don't should.

vmception• 5 years ago

You can change the law

There are many interactions with government agents that can expedited with more money, as long as that is codified in law

It isn't functionally different than payments outside of due process

bdcravens4• 5 years ago

When Ring started this program, they weren't yet owned by Amazon (according to the article, ended it in 2019; they were acquired in 2018, so it did persist for a little while under Amazon)

bdowling2• 5 years ago

It's illegal for us non-corporate types to bribe cops.

It's not a bribe if you don't ask for anything in return.

sneak2• 5 years ago

That means I've never bribed a cop, then. :)

slipframe2• 5 years ago

So it's not a bribe if I hand the cop a folded twenty under my drivers license, and don't say a word?

chairmanwow1• 5 years ago

Gifts are super important for landing big contracts. I've heard a lot of stories about sending VPs Away suitcases or watches to catch their attention and initiate a sale.

sohei• 5 years ago

There is a lot of outright corruption [1] and malfeasance [2] in the surveillance tech acquisition processes. It's probably because that process is so secret. Brandeis was right, "sunlight is the best disinfectant".

The strategy seems to be, "run the process in secret and present the result as a fait accompli". It's working.

[1] https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndil/pr/former-redflex-ceo-plea...

[2] https://www.vice.com/en/article/k7exem/banjo-ai-company-utah...

btilly• 5 years ago

When you have a new product, sometimes people need to be given it to figure out how to use it.

A classic example is Post-It notes. It sounded like something that nobody wanted. And it wasn't until 3M gave it to companies for free and found that 90% of them reordered that it began to see adoption. So the fact that a company hands out samples for free may just be a good marketing technique, and not bribery.

See https://www.ideatovalue.com/insp/nickskillicorn/2017/04/true... for a random link verifying the Post-It story.

slipframe2• 5 years ago

3M's target audience for post-it notes was offices, so they gave them away to offices.

Amazon's target audience for Ring is homeowners, so they gave them away to... not randomly selected homeowners. It sounds like they specifically gave them to police.

clircle• 5 years ago

Old marketing trick.

Patagonia and Keen send freebies and coupon codes to their influencers, the forest service.

iudqnolq• 5 years ago

I suspect you're referring to

The Patagonia Pro Program is a membership program for qualified outdoor professionals, environmental grant recipients, and outdoor industry partners.

The forestry service is a very strange example to call out because their employees aren't at all prominent and most well-off consumers will visit national/state parks instead of national forests (which are awesome, but much lower profile) so I doubt many of them ever see forestry service people wearing the gear.

throwawaysea• 5 years ago

I am surprised by the comments here which seem very fearful of Ring. Personally I welcome anything that helps police actually locate and arrest suspects. After all the crime we experience daily in cities like SF and Seattle, I am all for citizens being able to share footage and help the police along. If you don't support that, then you really don't support the enforcement of laws in general - which seems like an argument for crime and/or anarchy.

Personally I am not convinced by the slippery slope argument that Ring cameras will lead to broader unrestricted general surveillance. Ring customers can choose to voluntarily share footage with the police, or not - it's up to them. That's not the same as a dystopian ever-present dragnet. And even if we have cameras on every corner run by the government (rather than Ring), we can establish legal controls such as needing a warrant or reasonable suspicion of a crime to examine footage or perform facial recognition matches.

throwaway0a5e2• 5 years ago

The reason you have tons of crime in places like SF and Seattle is because of department and DA policy not to pursue these types of crimes even when there's evidence. More evidence doesn't make up for lack of political will.

tehwebguy• 5 years ago

Right, no matter how many people police assault or even murder there are virtually zero DAs willing to prosecute them. That’s what you are talking about, right?

There are of course the extremely rare cases where they’ll pretend to press charges and use a grand jury to get them dropped (e.g. Torgalski & McCabe), and the even more rare case where the murder gains so much publicity that they’ll have to pursue a real case (e.g. Chauvin) or is so incredibly heinous and brutal (e.g. Michael Valva) but by and large police will never face prosecution.

detaro• 5 years ago

A dragnet that random citizens opt-in to host infrastructure for is still a dragnet.

w0mbat• 5 years ago

Glock did crazy deals early on, letting US police departments trade-in their existing used guns from other makers for new Glocks at minimal or no cost.

Glock could afford to do it because Glocks are cheap to make due to the brilliantly simple design, with a manufacturing cost lower than the resale value of the used guns they were accepting.

Soon Glock owned the US police market, and that gave them the credibility to win in the US domestic market at full price.

fireball_blaze2• 5 years ago

Surely you aren't comparing people's expectations of a gun manufacturer versus Amazon?

Ring provided 100 LAPD officers with free devices to influence adoption

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