|
>
> | Revision 6 is unreadable | |
<
< |
| META TOPICPARENT | name="FirstEssay" |
|---|
Fear and Loathing on the Front Porch: Amazon’s Ring and “Surveillance” Capitalism
-- By JoseMartinez - v2 20 Jan 2021
Most tech companies profit from consumers’ fear of missing out, but Ring prefers to home in simply on their fear. Ring, Amazon's home security company, produces video doorbells and offers a social platform for users to upload and interact with footage. In so doing, Ring’s entire model hinges not only on literal surveillance, but also on surveillance capitalism as it commodifies its users’ personal data (their worst fears included). The company has partnered with police departments throughout the country to market its products and to facilitate information sharing with the state. Amazon’s full-fledged foray into home security may ostensibly put its users' minds at ease, but it also has the potential to erode community relationships and civil liberties.
Won’t You Be My Neighbor?
A Brief History
Like many modern products and services, Ring was born out of an entrepreneur’s search for a solution to a problem. In 2014, the company began producing WiFi? -connected video doorbell cameras and pitched them as a deterrence for home intruders. Ring later expanded its product line to include night-vision cameras and LED lights, and it became a full-suite security company.
And like many novel products and services, Ring was acquired by a tech behemoth. In 2018, Amazon purchased the company, enabling it to enter the home security market. Later that year, Ring launched Neighbors, a mobile application where users share camera footage and discuss crime and safety in their neighborhood.
How Ring Engages Users
Ring doorbell owners receive phone notifications when someone rings the doorbell or if someone or something is detected by the camera. Users can respond to the action and save the recorded footage. As part of its subscription service, Ring may store recordings for longer periods and even offers monitoring services.
Ring also operates a social platform, Neighbors. Doorbell owners and non-owners alike can download the app and report nearby suspicious activity. Users display anonymous identifiers (i.e., Neighbor43) and may upload videos from their doorbell cameras or submit warnings via text posts. News digests are sent out periodically and users can issue emergency alerts that are sent to all nearby users when they deem that someone or something poses a credible threat.
Relationships with Police Departments
Ring has partnered with over 400 police departments in the United States to further its goal of making neighborhoods safer. These relationships involve the direct marketing of products to consumers by police. Ring also offers discounted and bulk sales of its devices to a number of law enforcement agencies and, in turn, the agencies distribute them at a discount or for free throughout their communities.
In some localities, Ring also allows police to contact its users so that they may request footage from a user whose doorbell camera may have captured footage of criminal activity. While users may deny the request, Amazon also complies with search warrants requesting video footage, and there is no indication of whether the company or police agree to limit the sharing in any way.
No, Really, Be My Neighbor
However, by design, Ring is not simply a tool for securing the household. Instead, it takes cues from platforms like Facebook to command attention and trigger the user's emotions. Rather than lust, envy, and solitude, Ring exploits its users' chronic anxieties about their surroundings to generate more engagement and, as a result, more demand for Ring's products and services.
This effect becomes more pronounced when users are peppered with their neighbors' concerns about crime and safety. The receiver becomes thrusted into a feedback loop in which other people’s fears and distrust are reflected back to them. While proponents can characterize Ring as a modern neighborhood watch, the platform amplifies the dangerous hyper-vigilance associated with local watch groups in the first place: Users can look at their phone screens and easily sound the alarm when a suspicious courier walks by or when multiple people are gathered on the corner. There is, then, a heightened potential for neighbors to take action against people based on anonymous, speedy, and remote online reports that ultimately reach a large amount of people.
Ring’s doorbell recording itself also poses data privacy concerns not only for users but for those who are recorded by the devices. The software can recognize people who come into the camera’s view and footage is centrally stored in Amazon’s cloud servers. As such, recordings made by a user's own device on their own property and of other people could conceivably be held in perpetuity without them ever becoming aware. The widespread adoption of Ring and other security platforms means that users gain some property protection in exchange for privacy in their own home. Every "smart" indoor camera, motion sensor, and smoke detector in their homes creates piecemeal a state-sanctioned vigilance network. Ring's pursuit of partnerships with law enforcement not only results in increased brand awareness, but also cements the company as a willing pseudo-arm of the security state.
Conclusion
Ring’s model offers us a perfected execution of a service in the age of surveillance capitalism. Like other services and applications we've come to study in this class, the product competes with other apps for a user’s attention. However, by exploiting people’s fears about their safety and the sanctity of their property, platforms like these flip a person's deep vulnerabilities into profit. Under the guise of protecting communities, Ring and similar platforms can instead have adverse effects on neighbor relations and, in light of its cooperation with the stat, its practices raise important questions about the safety and security of its own users moving forward.
You are entitled to restrict access to your paper if you want to. But we all derive immense benefit from reading one another's work, and I hope you won't feel the need unless the subject matter is personal and its disclosure would be harmful or undesirable.
To restrict access to your paper simply delete the "#" character on the next two lines:
Note: TWiki has strict formatting rules for preference declarations. Make sure you preserve the three spaces, asterisk, and extra space at the beginning of these lines. If you wish to give access to any other users simply add them to the comma separated ALLOWTOPICVIEW list. |
|