Amazon Ring's lost dog ad sparks backlash amid fears of mass surveillance

https://www.theverge.com/tech/876866/ring-search-party-super-bowl-ad-online-backlash

by jedberg • 5 months ago

676 347 5 months ago

theverge.com

jedberg3• 5 months ago

Amazon also had the ad about Alexa killing you. Not sure what they were thinking exactly.

tantalor• 5 months ago

That ad was great. I'm not sure how it sells Alexa products, but it was hilarious.

cheschire• 5 months ago

Well you’re talking about it and not Siri

wakamoleguy• 5 months ago

It was some attempt at reductio ad absurdum. If you are concerned about letting Alexa into your home, you must be as irrational as Chris Hemsworth. Edit: I'm misusing reductio ad absurdum, but somebody will please tell me what the fallacy here is called.

dmoy• 5 months ago

Straw man?

1970-01-013• 5 months ago

What backlash? "People voiced concerns" turns out to be 9 people if you follow the link. Where exactly is this backlash and why can't I smell it?

wolvoleo2• 5 months ago

Ring has experienced backlash before when they allowed police departments to browse the imagery without any kind of oversight or warrant. And has changed their policies as a result (in the most minimal way but ok)

And these are pretty high profile people whose job it is to represent the people who will also have concerns but don't all contact the verge about it :)

By the way i use ring cameras too but I've already mitigated them a lot. Installed telephoto lenses that can only see the specific area I want them to see, and I removed the microphones so they can't hear what I'm saying. I got some free with my ring alarm so I didn't really want to waste the hardware either.

ranger_danger• 5 months ago

If you search for this story on other sites, the comments are full of backlash.

igleria• 5 months ago

At what number of people do you consider it a backlash?

1970-01-013• 5 months ago

1% of subscribers

add-sub-mul-div• 5 months ago

The subtext is that idiots are buying these things and should at least become aware that there are reasons for backlash that haven't occurred to them.

assimpleaspossi• 5 months ago

I found out that on Reddit people go there and ask things like this (someone asked recently): "My girlfriend and I are looking for something to do. Are there any protests going on today we can go to?"

Can you imagine people actually searching things out like that? These "people voicing concerns" are like that. Someone has to find something to be enraged about for the sake of finding something to do.

goatlover• 5 months ago

Or people are concerned about living in a surveillance state and wish to protest that or some other issue. Why downplay legitimate societal concerns?

olyjohn• 5 months ago

Can you imagine people actually believing a post on Reddit, and then extrapolating that to everybody who is going to a protest?

wantlotsofcurry• 5 months ago

What an absurd take.

nutjob2• 5 months ago

So instead of drinking or shopping they want to support a cause?

My god how do they live with themselves.

egorfine• 5 months ago

Exactly. There are certainly more than 9 of us who value privacy and understand where this is going, but in comparison to millions of normies we aren't even a screeching voice of minority[1].

[1] https://www.howtogeek.com/746588/apple-discusses-screeching-...

teeray• 5 months ago

Everyone I’ve talked to about the Super Bowl ads has mentioned that one and said that it is creepy af. The backlash is mostly word of mouth in my experience.

gentleman11• 5 months ago

Fears of mass surveillance? It's already mass surveillance

colechristensen• 5 months ago

This nitpick in language adds nothing to the conversation and is fundamentally incorrect. "Fears of" does not imply the thing feared doesn't exist.

raised_by_foxes• 5 months ago

Fear of bears in the woods? We already had bears.

davidw• 5 months ago

The WeRateDogs guy broke character and put out a video attacking that ad

https://bsky.app/profile/weratedogs.com/post/3mejrtyvkyc2o

blell• 5 months ago

The weratedogs guy has been posting political messages for as long as I can remember. This is completely in character for him.

moffkalast• 5 months ago

"They aren't good politicians, Bront."

Archelaos2• 5 months ago

What exactly are the "neighborhood cameras" mentioned in the article?

jedberg3• 5 months ago

Everyone's Ring doorbells and cameras.

Archelaos2• 5 months ago

Is it legal in the USA to point them on public ground?

wolvoleo2• 5 months ago

https://archive.is/J7KGU

Archive link posted because in some cases (not all, strange enough) there's a paywall ("subscribe to continue reading")

crooked-v• 5 months ago

That ad gave me a visceral shudder of revulsion, not so much for the specific functionality on display as for the timing, which absolutely could not have been accidental. They might as well have just put 'and we're working on automatic alerts for ICE!' in the ad.

themafia2• 5 months ago

"Helping abusive husbands find their escaped wives."

blibble5• 5 months ago

that advert is just so horribly manipulative it's borderline evil

how can normal people go to work and produce this output?

(I suppose everyone that is prepared to work at Amazon corporate is... a certain type of person)

idle_zealot2• 5 months ago

It's not really about the individual people. They're probably all pretty normal interpersonally. Our systems reward this behavior, so people do it. Surveillance is desired by the politically and economically powerful, and the contravening forces are weak and largely unorganized. Do we punish politicians or businesses for bad behavior? No? Then they'll engage in whatever behavior advances their interests.

You could purge the world of every single person with evil intentions, and things would maybe get better for a little while, but without fundamentally changing the underlying rules of the system the same thing would play out again with different actors.

blibble5• 5 months ago

They're probably all pretty normal interpersonally.

have you seen the cult like statements they make you emit if you want to pass the interview?

I had a colleague that interviewed there (and was accepted)

over the space of that month he completely changed

(and not for the better)

gorjusborg3• 5 months ago

It's not really about the individual people. They're probably all pretty normal interpersonally. Our systems reward this behavior, so people do it.

Sorry, but people who do things they normally wouldn't because they are rewarded are not good people. They may be 'normal' in a distribution sense, but that doesn't mean the behavior becomes acceptable through it becoming commonplace.

foobar_______• 5 months ago

I like your take. I see this same thing playing out across many parts of the world.

Dont hate the player hate the game

It is about incentives and rules of the "game" that drive things. Sure, there are a few evil people but the vast majority of it is normal people responding to broken rules/incentives. Probably you and I both fall in this category :)

AlexandrB4• 5 months ago

Surveillance is desired by the politically and economically powerful

It's also desired by consumers. Parents love tracking their children, spouses track each other. Everyone wants to get a camera to catch porch pirates. Let's not pretend this is something being forced on us by some external evil. The evil is coming from inside the house.

themafia2• 5 months ago

You pay a third party to make something like this for you. They can best be described as nihilists.

dheera5• 5 months ago

Because if you don't do what you are told at work, you may be forced to uproot your family, spouse, kids, and leave the country. You may be forced to abandon your pets and never see them again, forced to send your kids to suddenly school in a different, foreign-to-them language. You may be forced to pay tens of thousands in moving expenses. You may be forced to pay mortgages for a house you are not allowed to live in. All it takes is one unhappy manager at Amazon, or falling it the wrong bucket at stack ranking time.

Or you can do what your manager asks you to do, over-deliver on it year after year, and you won't have to deal with the above. You may be unhappy with what you do at work, but your kids and spouse will live happy lives, and you can keep your pets and house.

Sorry, just a dose of reality.

ajam1507• 5 months ago

Grow a spine, you don't get a pass to do unethical things because your job depends on it.

blibble5• 5 months ago

as a species, we are fucked if there's many people that fit your description

your kids have to live on this earth too, and they'll suffer the consequences of cowardly people like that

caditinpiscinam• 5 months ago

Wealth should be a source of power and agency, not an excuse for getting dogwalked. On the bright side, given that kids and houses and spouses are all becoming luxury items, there may be fewer people in the future who have to make that choice.

"Learn to live on lentils, and you will not have to be subservient to the king"

text0404• 5 months ago

Even more concerning is that Ring is partnering with Flock [1], which has been the subject of quite a bit of controversy recently [2][3][4], with the CEO lashing out at critics with inflammatory language [5][6].

[1] https://www.flocksafety.com/blog/flock-safety-and-ring-partn...

[2] https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/flock-roundup

[3] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/10/ice-school-c...

[4] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/12/effs-investigations-ex...

[5] https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/flock-ceo-goes-...

[6] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46903556

mjr003• 5 months ago

The Dark Knight was released in 2008. In that movie, Batman hijacks citizens' cellphones to track down the Joker, and it's presented as a major moral and ethical dilemma as part of the movie's overall themes. The only way Batman remains a "good guy" in the eyes of the audience is by destroying the entire thing once he's done.

Crazy to think that less than two decades later, an even more powerful surveillance technology is being advertised at the Super Bowl as a great and wonderful thing and you should totally volunteer to upload your Ring footage so it can be analyzed for tracking down the Jok... I mean illegal imm... I mean lost pets.

ViktorRay• 5 months ago

The Dark Knight was released in the summer of 2008. This was almost 7 years after 9/11.

Many aspects of that film were deliberately done to explore post 9/11 America. This includes the methods Harvey Dent uses, the things the Joker says, and the surveillance scenes and more.

These discussions surrounding surveillance have been around long before 2008.

mjr003• 5 months ago

Of course. The use of mass surveillance in the movie is not-so-subtly referencing the PATRIOT Act. But again, it's presented as a moral dilemma, and multiple protagonists acknowledge that it's far too powerful to exist, and its use is a last resort. It falls into the larger theme of Joker pushing Batman to violate his ethics for the greater good.

One could argue that because it was successfully used to catch Joker, the movie concludes that mass surveillance is sometimes necessary to stop evil, but it's at least presented as a dilemma. A massive corporation coming out and saying "mass surveillance is awesome because you can find lost pets" is a crazy escalation of the surveillance state.

jazzyjackson• 5 months ago

Charlie's Angels (circa 2000) uses voice recognition and geolocation of cell signal as the terrifying new technology that allows the villain to track down his nemesis, Charlie. The entire film is about the Angels getting hoodwinked into giving Sam Rockwell access to the mainframe. Fun movie.

slg9• 5 months ago

It's hard to not become disillusioned with our industry when most of it is just the manifesting of that Torment Nexus tweet. It's like no one in the tech world actually understands any piece of fiction that they have ever consumed.

RankingMember• 5 months ago

I knew plenty of people growing up who thought Fight Club was just a fun movie about guys who like to fight and make a club to do so and it gets a little crazy, then cut to credits. They then theorized making their own such club. This to say, yeah, I think sometimes the audience can be overestimated in their ability to understand deeper meaning in art.

malfist• 5 months ago

Never doubt they understand, there's just too much money to be made making the Torment Nexus

mlsu• 5 months ago

I've had a startling number of conversations exactly like this:

"Oh, you read as well? What do your read?"

"[this book], [that book]"

"Those are all non-fiction, any fiction?"

"I don't read fiction. If I'm not going to learn anything, it's a waste of time."

"..."

nektro• 5 months ago

its far simpler than that; not caring about what they've built if the check is big enough. because they've taught us that "if i don't build it, they'll just hire someone else. might as well be me that gets the money." but if there was solidarity or more regulation it'd be much less of a guarantee that these things would be built.

alfalfasprout• 5 months ago

You'll see on HN itself how many people want to work on this surveillance. How many people want all white collar work eliminated by AI. How many people want a quick buck at anyone's expense, the morality be damned.

Money and only money talks nowadays. It's sad.

hackable_sand3• 5 months ago

Video games are jammed with the follies of man. Elden Ring: Nightreign is a recent anthology of moral lessons.

deaux2• 5 months ago

If we're looking globally, the huuge majority of our industry isn't part of manifesting the Torment Nexus. Unfortunately a lot of HN is, because interest in SV/VC strongly biases towards interest in achieving personal goals (including but not limited to financial earnings), over caring about building something that helps society.

And no, of course not everyone in SV is like that, and not every VC-funded company helps inch towards the Torment Nexus. But there's inherently a strong bias towards it.

Amezarak• 5 months ago

It’s important to note that fiction does not map to reality. It’s fiction. You cannot learn how the world works through fiction. It’s just the author’s ideas about the world in a narrative framework that may or may not be true.

I find it very frustrating when people confuse the two. Reading fiction doesn’t give you an interpretive lens for reality. Reading history does. Saying this is “just like when in Harry Potter / Star Wars / Star Trek x happened” is totally meaningless and not predictive of anything in the real world.

ishouldstayaway2• 5 months ago

It's like no one in the tech world actually understands any piece of fiction that they have ever consumed.

Of course they don't. Have you seen how common it is in tech circles to deride humanities education?

koolba2• 5 months ago

The only way Batman remains a "good guy" in the eyes of the audience is by destroying the entire thing once he's done.

A key part of that is when he tells Alfred that he did not even trust himself with that level of surveillance and coded it to only grant access to Alfred. Further, Alfred agrees to aid Batman by accessing the data but simultaneously tenders his resignation.

I doubt Amazon has anyone like Alfred in charge of this thing. Because if they did, the resignation would already have been submitted.

polar• 5 months ago

Alfred

Wasn't it Lucius Fox?

foobarian• 5 months ago

These kinds of resignations are interesting. The character is such a good protagonist, he resigns rather than do Bad Thing. But that pretty much guarantees the boss will hire someone more pliable. Why not instead swallow the pride and do Bad Thing but with some level of moderation? That would surely be a better outcome overall.

The argument is that it would destroy the character's honor or whatever. But that is also a kind of sacrifice for the greater good. Maybe a lot of those are in fact happening but just not visible.

Gagarin19172• 5 months ago

I mean the message in The Dark Knight is really messy. The characters believe it’s immoral, but they use it anyway, and it saves lives and stops the Joker.

mjr003• 5 months ago

Yeah, as I say in a sibling comment, it's a fair reading of the movie that it's ultimately pro-surveillance because it shows that despite being immoral, unethical mass surveillance catches the bad guy. But "surveillance is unethical but necessary when battling the forces of evil" is worlds away from "surveillance is totally awesome and everyone should buy a Ring camera."

b00ty4breakfast3• 5 months ago

This is a bit orthogonal to the article, but Christopher Nolan gives me the willies. Almost all his films have this kind authoritarian apologia in them.

dylan6042• 5 months ago

Is that the same willies as something like 1984 or Black Mirror? All they are doing is taking some idea present now, and just taking it too the darker places of it while society is currently only seeing the rosy side of things. It's stories like this that might be first time someone might actually consider other implications of ideas.

fwip• 5 months ago

The Dark Knight Rises (the batman movie with Bane) seemed especially notable in this way - almost directly caricaturing the Occupy Wall St protests that were relevant at the time.

tsunamifury• 5 months ago

Do not mistake Nolan's ability to call out the failures of both absolute freedom and absolute control and their interaction with him advocating for any of them.

Don't get the willies from the warning, learn from it.

His brother and the writer, Jonathan Nolan, is the greatest prophet of our era.

awkward• 5 months ago

To be fair that's more than a little bit present in most superhero media.

ragazzina• 5 months ago

Every single Hollywood movie has authoritarian apologia, you don't have to go to Christopher Nolan or Forrest Gump. The most recent example is One battle after another.

"Wait, There’s Torture in Zootopia?" DOI:10.1017/S1537592719005012

cyode• 5 months ago

Pulled from IMDB, Morgan Freeman as Lucius Fox voices the consternation perfectly:

Batman: [seeing the wall of monitors for the first time at the Applied Sciences division in Wayne Enterprises] Beautiful, isn't it?
Lucius Fox: Beautiful... unethical... dangerous. You've turned every cellphone in Gotham into a microphone.
Batman: And a high-frequency generator-receiver.
Lucius Fox: You took my sonar concept and applied it to every phone in the city. With half the city feeding you sonar, you can image all of Gotham. This is wrong.
Batman: I've gotta find this man, Lucius.
Lucius Fox: At what cost?
Batman: The database is null-key encrypted. It can only be accessed by one person.
Lucius Fox: This is too much power for one person.
Batman: That's why I gave it to you. Only you can use it.
Lucius Fox: Spying on 30 million people isn't part of my job description.

culi4• 5 months ago

Lmao did they really say it's null-key encrypted?

Unfortunately a very realistic depiction of how many of the brands advertising their security the strongest often have the most ridiculously broken security (flock)

chatmasta• 5 months ago

That system is nothing compared to the geolocation databases curated by Apple and Google, with GPS sensors combined with Wi-Fi wardriving, IMEI tracking, cell tower handoffs, and the rest of the insane amount of telemetry they collect collect in real time. And that’s before even considering BLE and the Find My network. Imagine the “God mode” dashboards they could have in Cupertino (or more likely, in Mountain View).

dangets• 5 months ago

Go back a little bit further to another Morgan Freeman movie - Se7en (1995) and a big plot point was that it is unthinkable for big brother to be keeping records of what library books people are checking out. Times sure have changed...

bayindirh• 5 months ago

In the series Person of Interest, there's a scene where you can see racks of servers which allows to track everyone in a city (New York?).

When I first saw the scene I said: "This amount of servers is not remotely enough to pull something like this".

When I think of the scene now: "These amount of servers can do much more than the scene portrays".

I mean, most of the tech presented in the series is almost standard operations procedure via mundane equipment now.

Scary.

whiskey-one• 5 months ago

Subsequently in PoI we see two imperfect super-intelligent AIs let loose in the real world fight each other for domination and their objectives.

For me, it’s a question of when, not if this happens in real life.

twostorytower• 5 months ago

I believe they also pull this off with a fleet of PS3s, at one point.

chrisrogers• 5 months ago

My read is that it's immoral because it's a surveillance hijack without the knowledge of the users, as opposed to an opt-in.

whattheheckheck• 5 months ago

And its not just opt in for the camera owner/licensor it should be explicitly optin for anyone who gets recorded

tavavex• 5 months ago

The Amazon Knight (2028): Batman hacks Ring cameras to track down the Joker, showing himself to be a rebellious vigilante who's not afraid to break a company's ToS to make justice happen. After the job is done, cut to a montage of Batman telling an Amazon worker about Wayne Enterprises' new villain-detection technology that could be used to upgrade Ring, then screwing in cameras in every room of every building of the city, and then proudly telling the bystanders that they won't have to suffer any more. He's invited to a ceremony where Jeff Bezos thanks him. A swarm of anti-evil Amazon drones takes off, flooding the city streets. The morning sun rises over Gotham City, colors become more saturated, faint shots of executing every criminal in the city can be heard. The civilians run to the streets to cheer it on, finally free from oppression. The screen fades to white, revealing the Ring Camera Pro 3 Batman Edition, complete with a Batman logo on its black outer shell. "Now only $99! (Available for free in partner municipalities)"

JohnMakin• 5 months ago

I think it’s because in the early 2010’s these companies were doing truly awesome things, at least in my pov. Google search felt like magic and a portal to a web you could only imagine, facebook actually connected you with friends, nothing like amazon ecommerce had existed yet, cloud shit was insanely cool. Hell, my primary motivation in pursuing my degree was to work at google. I recoil in horror thinking about it now.

I think the trust gained there will be hard to break from people, that in my experience, genuinely do not realize what a complete 180 these companies have done. I sometimes wonder and am fearful at what type of thing would need to happen before people en masse realize it.

doctorpangloss• 5 months ago

let's get this stupid social media purity test thing out of the way: blah blah blah, i oppose surveillance.

now that that's over, the phone is definitely more powerful surveillance technology than a ring camera

you can turn off your phone, so uh, it's not as powerful as it seems.

and practically speaking, ring cameras run out of battery all the time. and also, you can cover them.

the stupidest thing about this whole discourse is that, by participating in it in the particular way that you are, you are feeding directly into what Amazon wants, which is for their absolutely dogshit technology to be perceived as something a lot more valuable and powerful than it really is.

Lammy• 5 months ago

And now Palantir sells exactly this product, literally named Gotham https://www.palantir.com/platforms/gotham/

EA-3167• 5 months ago

If you want to see where the discussion on privacy and tech has gone since, suffer through the recent “film” Mercy. A sane reading of the premise would suggest a profoundly anti-surveillance and AI message, but it’s quite the opposite.

In an way it’s best paired with the Amazon mess War of The Worlds, which is so thematically empty that it ultimately seems to suggest that while you can’t trust the government with your data, Amazon is a great custodian!

loeg4• 5 months ago

Surely it's problematic that Batman doesn't have consent to hijack phones? Whereas participating in Ring is voluntary?

Anyway, movies aren't, like, the arbiters of truth. Sometimes they just have simplistic themes.

CursedSilicon• 5 months ago

Is it voluntary to be recorded by Ring cameras?

63stack• 5 months ago

By that logic having a phone is voluntary as well

stackghost2• 5 months ago

My background is aerospace engineering. Specifically, I have managed technical risk on a variety of aircraft fleets including SAR, military tactical aviation, and special missions aircraft. In a nutshell my job was to look at complex systems, identify likely failure modes, and come up with engineering solutions. I'm very good at it. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it turns out that identifying failure modes in complex systems is a highly transferable skill.

When I launched my first startup shortly after COVID I realized that that skillset makes me shitty at raising capital because I tend to only see the faults in my ideas and I end up with a "nobody would pay for this" mindset. But I also tend to easily spot the ways that tech companies' products can (will, do) go sideways. I am a perennial late adopter. I don't own an Alexa or really anything "smart" equivalent because I knew early on that they would become dystopian surveillance devices and/or security risks.

And I am so off-the-charts tired of being right.

lnsru• 5 months ago

My personal question to you: were you able commercialize your error finding skills? I am electrical engineer, I predict very early the week when shit hits the fan. Nobody listens and most of my job nowadays is cleaning the shit. I am sooo tired of being right. I want to find a way to use my future forecast skill instead of fixing obvious things afterwards. One manager told me it’s a normal process to hit the wall at full speed and the re-scope project and move from there. But damn… I don’t want to waste my lifetime doing obvious errors and fixing them. To be clear, errors happen and it’s fine. But most of them are easily predictable.

ChrisArchitect• 5 months ago

[dupe] Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46950915

nullbyte• 5 months ago

I'm afraid that ship has sailed

Gagarin19172• 5 months ago

Bullshit. The only people worried are the ones that were already concerned and never bought a Ring.

I guarantee the vast majority of people LOVE this new feature.

i_love_retros2• 5 months ago

Bullshit to you sir. I have a ring and have cancelled my subscription because of their scummy behavior

JoshTriplett2• 5 months ago

Thank you for that. But please consider taking down the camera, too; it's just as much of a problem without a subscription, because you are the service being sold, not just the customer. Get one that stores and processes video entirely locally instead.

gorjusborg3• 5 months ago

Part of the problem here is that people who love it are affecting people who do not. If you want to put cameras to record inside your home, fine, but this is people recording their neighbors without consent. The sales pitch is finding Fido, but I doubt that is the end game here.

alex435787• 5 months ago

A Ring camera pointed at a sidewalk or street is the clearest example of legally allowed filming in public I could imagine.

neaden• 5 months ago

"I guarantee the vast majority of people LOVE this new feature." And you base this guarantee on?

josefritzishere• 5 months ago

Amazon has a very bad track record in this area. https://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/voices/amazon-is-wagi...

Traubenfuchs• 5 months ago

joseffritz

As an Austrian I have to wonder, is this name a homage to Josef Fritzl, one of the most well known Austrians of modern time?

bradley13• 5 months ago

Recording public spaces should be illegal. Public street? Public sidewalk? Not your turf, no cameras, no recording.

jedberg3• 5 months ago

I'm not sure you've thought this through. That would mean you can't record law enforcement or any other abuse of power.

The issue here isn't the recording, it's the packaging it up for sale that's the issue.

nullc• 5 months ago

I've given a bit of thought on this, and I think the best path might be civil liability for the privacy loss-- defined broadly. Private security camera that never goes anywhere? You're fine. Start posting that same footage online where it results in people being massively tracked: big liability.

I think otherwise it's too difficult to define the exact boundary between harmful and harmless use-- instead it's better to say that if your use harms someone you'll regret it.

toephu2• 5 months ago

So google maps streetview should be illegal?

Dylan168073• 5 months ago

I think that goes too far, but limiting public space recordings to a camera you're operating in person would be a good starting point.

alex435787• 5 months ago

Good idea: keep the confrontational 1st amendment auditors, lose the benefits of security cameras. /s

gbolcer• 5 months ago

Yeah in a world where if you post a Ring video of someone taking a crowbar to your mailbox which gets a strike in your neighborhood group and the video down for "hate", yeah, as useful as it is, the mass surveillance stuff is pretty alarming.

damnesian• 5 months ago

Know what is super easy to do? Not buy Amazon Ring products.

mr_machine• 5 months ago

Know what is super hard to do? Leave your house without being caught by someone else's Ring camera.

foxfired• 5 months ago

There’s no need to fear the construction of mass surveillance anymore. It’s already here. We built it one convenience at a time [0]. When I see all my friends with Alexa devices at home, ring cameras, and a million food apps on their phones, it feels like it’s already too late.

[0] https://idiallo.com/blog/we-have-all-we-need-for-mass-survei...

an-allen• 5 months ago

The fears of mass surveillance are some of the funniest things I can think of. Do you think a tree grows a leaf and then says I don’t care what you do leaf.

pibaker• 5 months ago

There would be less backlash to the Ring ad if the ad was honest about how people actually use it. Show us porch pirates, burglars and stupid neighbor who backs into your car being caught on camera.

But instead, they have to come up with something "wholesome" like finding your lost doggo. The wholesomeness is so forced and cringe that it makes you think they have something to hide. It almost feels like the people who wrote this ad and the people who greenlit it knew something was wrong so they have to come up with a cover story. But like a child smiling at you with his biggest smile while anxiously keeping his hands behind his back, it only makes them more suspicious especially in a time when big tech feels more and more like an adversary than a friend.

wat100003• 5 months ago

Isn't the whole point of the ad that they have a new feature and they want people to know about it? They're not making up the idea of finding lost dogs. They have a new feature where you upload a photo of your lost dog and it automatically looks for the dog in camera feeds.

frm888• 5 months ago

The ad states that 1 million dogs are lost every year and that Ring returns 1 dog every day. Could the uselessness of the feature be any more prominent?

Atlas667• 5 months ago

The infrastructure is still there. It's the infrastructure that's the problem, the marketing is kind of whatever...

Ring has been a problem and it has only gotten worse now.

HiPhish2• 5 months ago

porch pirates

It absolutely boggles my mind that it's legal in the US for a deliverer to just leave a package out in the open for anyone to pick up and consider it "delivered". Might as well just throw it out of the window of your car, it has the same chance of getting picked up by the recipient. Where I live the package has to be handed over to the recipient. If the recipient is not available it will be handed over to a neighbour and this will be noted on a little card that's placed in the recipient's mail box. If that is not possible it will be taken back to the mail office and the recipient can pick it up in person.

Adding video surveillance is no solution. OK, so you saw a random stranger pick up your package. Now what? What are you going to do with that information? Are the police going to start a manhunt because of your 50$ Amazon order?

WrongAssumption• 5 months ago

No thanks. I want packages delivered when I’m not home. If i want it to be handed to me I can require it be handed to me, picked up, or delivered to a nearby store. If I wanted to go pick up a package I would just go to the store in the first place.

Most stuff doesn’t matter, and is rarely stolen. If something matters I’ll just have the delivery company do what I guess is required in where you live, I can choose.

rootusrootus2• 5 months ago

Do you live somewhere with high crime? The reason deliveries work this way in the US is that porch pirates are uncommon. There is a flurry of them during the holidays, but even then, the vast majority of deliveries are just fine.

What are you going to do with that information?

Nothing, because by the time I look at my doorbell camera I would already have told the shipper the package was swiped and they will have shipped a replacement. They might take it up with the shipper, or call it a cost of doing business, whatever, but it won't be -my- problem.

parineum2• 5 months ago

It absolutely boggles my mind that it's legal in the US for a deliverer to just leave a package out in the open for anyone to pick up and consider it "delivered".

The actual answer to your conundrum here is that the package isn't actually considered delivered.

When you order something, it's the seller's responsibility to get it to you. They have the choice of having their deliveries require a signature to be delivered but that costs more so they consider stolen packages as a cost of business.

If a package is stolen, it hasn't been delivered. You report to the company you bought from and they send you a new one. They can negotiate with the shipping company if they are at fault.

The reason for the practice of leaving packages at your door is that it's cheaper to replace the few stolen packages for free than it is to pay a driver to require signatures for each package.

High value or non-replaceable items can be shipped more securely.

rconti• 5 months ago

Show us porch pirates, burglars and stupid neighbor who backs into your car being caught on camera.

This is what their ads have been showing for the last many years.

The dog thing is the new feature they're hawking.

seanmcdirmid2• 5 months ago

You can use this to track down the guy who just stole your Amazon package and is still making the rounds in your hood.

dev_l1x_be• 5 months ago

Are you a dog?? No?? So you do not have anything to worry about!!

So they say.

orthecreedence2• 5 months ago

Risking downvotes, I am adding this so I can always be reminded of this comment and how much it made me laugh.

Animats• 5 months ago

They don't have a lost-kid feature?

In China, kids are accustomed to face recognition early.[1] The kids are checking into school via fare gates with face recognition. Here's an ad for Hikvision surveillance systems showing the whole system.[2] Hikvision has a whole series of videos presenting their concept of a kindly, gentler Big Brother. This is probably the most amusing.[3]

Amazon's concept is in some ways more powerful. They don't need full coverage. Just sparse, but widespread coverage. Anything that moves around will pass through the view of cameras at some point. Suspicious behavior can be detected in the back end cloud processing, which improves over time.

Flock has the same concept. Flock coverage is sparse in terms of area, but widespread.

"1984" was so last cen.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/shorts/SMKG8aLTJ38

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XnHFJz-u85A

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=otAuH6FDhgw

MarleTangible• 5 months ago

I think the initial plan was to introduce lost-kid/elderly plan, but they thought people will be more willing to accept a pet version (pun indented) first.

Also the implementation is quite strange as well. I can imagine a version where the camera itself compares the recorded footage against a well-known database of lost children, just like the milk cartons.

RcouF1uZ4gsC• 5 months ago

I think Nancy Guthrie and the release of the doorbell video by scouring Google’s caches has done far, far more to make people want video cameras and cloud storage than any ad.

throwaway743• 5 months ago

What's not given as much coverage is how she didn't have a subscription, yet the footage was still recorded pulled from servers. That's concerning.

russellbeattie• 5 months ago

Amazon marketing broke a fundamental rule about consumer tech: Don't remind users about how much Big Tech knows about you.

Your various devices track everywhere you go, who you communicate with, what you search for, what you buy, what audio you listen to, what videos you watch, what games you play, who your family is, all your pictures and video you take, who comes and goes from your house, when you sleep, your health data, and much more.

And as a fundamental part of Big Tech's business they accumulate, aggregate and analyze all that information in various ways to increase profits. They don't keep this a secret, but wisely they normally don't brag about it to the general public.

Consumers have shown that are totally willing to give up privacy for convenience. Just don't remind them of it.

manicennui• 5 months ago

Did they not realize that it is already a mass surveillance network?

isametry• 5 months ago

The Circle (2017) is by no means a perfect movie, based on a 2013 book which I’m told is only marginally better.

But it did do a surprisingly accurate job of depicting pretty much this exact scenario, 9 (13) years in advance.

As in: sleek FAANG holds a grand showcase of mass surveillance using its ubiquitous user-installed smart cameras, under the guise of a good cause.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=Mro9RCAhvE4

(The fictional story is slightly more blunt about it, the good cause being finding wanted persons, rather than lost dogs).

kmoser• 5 months ago

Even if it can and will only be used to track dogs, that means if I have a photo of someone's dog I can track it and learn that the owner is (likely) away from their house.

frm888• 5 months ago

Good point! Thank you.

jimt1234• 5 months ago

I thought Ring was already sending data to law enforcement agencies (that paid Amazon for it). Also, I thought the EULA included language that basically said, "All your data are belong to us", so they could already do whatever surveillance they want.

xyst• 5 months ago

A country ruled by fear has their "security" systems turned on themselves. We truly live in an Orwellian dystopia

CrzyLngPwd2• 5 months ago

A mobile phone is the surveillance dictators' wet dream.

What are my subjects doing...tap tap tap...ah there they are. Oh him, he needs to be cancelled, he isn't where I wanted him to be.

frm888• 5 months ago

Feersum Endjinn has this plot line. Can recommend.

CrzyLngPwd2• 5 months ago

Ohhh thank you :-)

teaearlgraycold• 5 months ago

Just airtag your dog? Jesus Christ.

eddyg• 5 months ago

Quoting from the press release: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2026/01/apple-introduces-new-...

"Designed exclusively for tracking objects, and not people or pets"

(emphasis mine)

VanTheBrand• 5 months ago

That’s just so you don’t sue the over your lost dog

apparent3• 5 months ago

The situation with the Nancy Guthrie disappearance and Nest camera footage is related, and interesting. It seems that she had a Nest doorbell camera, but didn't pay for the subscription plan ($100/yr?). As a result, the camera records short snippets but doesn't save them to the cloud in a user-accessible way.

After a week, Google finally hunted down/coughed up the footage. I imagine there were some people within Google who realized that if they provided the footage immediately, then it could discourage people from paying for the subscription.

Of course, they must also realize that by not providing the footage sooner, they may have allowed the perp to get away, or the victim to be killed.

ibejoeb3• 5 months ago

That is one of the weirder aspects of this run of the simulation.

Ring: just want you to know that we record everything whether you pay us or not and we know where you dog is.

Savannah: Where's Ma?

Ring:

apparent3• 5 months ago

FWIW, Nancy's camera was a Nest, not Ring.

ibejoeb3• 5 months ago

It's so overt that I wouldn't blame you for thinking that they don't care and that they want you to know.

LightBug1• 5 months ago

Move Fast and Stasi Things ...

morkalork• 5 months ago

It's you. You're the dog. Now roll over and sit-pretty for your oligarchical overlords.

puppycodes• 5 months ago

Fears?

This has already been happening for years.

rightbyte2• 5 months ago

LLMs might have changed the feasibility of cheap data analysis a bit.

IAmGraydon• 5 months ago

Yet massive numbers of people (I'm sure including many on this thread) are buying and installing Ring cameras. It's always been a surveillance network.

analogpixel• 5 months ago

I wonder if we'll see backlash of people wandering around ripping out/smashing/destorying ring cameras from their neighbors doors.

mixmastamyk2• 5 months ago

I've thought about spray painting them pink, so they stand out.

tjpnz• 5 months ago

Are people going to start referring to said homeowners as ringholes?

drnick1• 5 months ago

The main issue is that fearmongering, aggressive marketing (as seen here), and subsidized pricing has convinced people to buy that spyware. The playbook is very much the same as for the Alexa and other "bugs" people now willingly pay for and place in the middle of their homes, constantly recording and monitoring their activities.

In reality, these cameras are next to useless when it comes to protecting the owners as seen in other news. If you fear a home invasion, it's a shotgun that you need, not a Ring camera.

colinhb• 5 months ago

Very much appreciated the internet's #1 dog-rating account covering this:

https://www.instagram.com/reels/DUlye8NETR3/

flyingzucchini• 5 months ago

We are all now dogs

m3kw9• 5 months ago

This is Airtag, but for video

ram_rattle• 5 months ago

I genuinely want someone to build nice tech to solve this problem, I have a cctv at my home and once a month a cop shows up to get some info on a crime that has happened in my area, tech like homomorphic encryption should get really really good so that searching for a image or video in a footage should not create privacy nightmare.

matt-attack• 5 months ago

Did anyone catch the recent development in the Nancy Guthrie kidnapping story?

For days it was explained that, while she had a Nest doorbell camera (which was stolen by the kidnapper) it was sadly useless because Nancy wasn’t paying for cloud storage. Just live video and notifications.

Well what do know happened today? The video of the kidnapper was magically produced by Google. I guess, even when you don’t pay for storage, they’re… you know…. Recording and saving the video anyway.

No one’s really bothered to point this out as they’re all just so excited that the video has turned up.

zombot• 5 months ago

It has been pointed out in another HN comment thread, but ... surveillors gonna surveil, that's how they make money and accumulate power.

maxehmookau• 5 months ago

Turns out you're not buying the storage and compute required to store your video. Google can afford that regardless of whether you pay.

They're licensing your own video back to you.

pardon_me• 5 months ago

Do they just store everything? How long is that sustainable?

bruckie• 5 months ago

Google doorbell cameras send clips to the cloud. They're accessible to users for 3 hours for free, and a month or two if you pay. While they become unavailable to users after 3 hours, it's unlikely that they're deleted immediately—partly for operational reasons (easier to clear out many clips periodically in a batch process, rather than individual clips one by one exactly when they expire), and partly because Google keeps a lot of data around for a short period (a week or two) to be able to debug systems. Even when data is requested to be deleted, it's often possible to recover it from off-site backups or soft-deleted data stores for a while. Google ensures that all user data is actually, irrecoverably deleted within 2 months after a deletion request (see https://policies.google.com/technologies/retention).

wraptile• 5 months ago

The frog has been boiled when it comes to information privacy and if you were an alien you'd think humanity sacrificed privacy and safety for something important but no, it's to trace someone's lost dog. Hilarious.

motbus3• 5 months ago

What people mean by "could be used?" That's the wrong verbe tense.

elischleifer• 5 months ago

Of all the things Amazon brings to the marketplace - global surveillance is not one I would advertise on the superbowl.

aroheir• 5 months ago

The system could have used base64 encryption, imagine a mood mesh ring or 'gizmo' for Kotlin DSL code reviews.

Amazon Ring's lost dog ad sparks backlash amid fears of mass surveillance

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