Leaked pics from Amazon Ring show potential new surveillance features
Enlarge / Ready for your closeup? (credit: Kameleon007)
Amazon subsidiary Ring, which has partnerships with almost 1,200 law enforcement agencies nationwide, does not currently include facial recognition or license plate scanning tools in its home surveillance line of consumer products. The company appears to be evaluating the feature feasibility of adding both tools, however, raising additional privacy concerns for its pervasive platform.
Ring last week distributed a confidential survey to beta testers weighing sentiment and demand for several potential new features in future versions of its software. According to screenshots shared with Ars, potential new features for Ring include options for enabling or disabling the camera both physically and remotely, both visual and audible alarms to ward off "would-be criminals," and potential object, facial, and license plate detection.
Such surveys usually include options a company is considering offering, though not necessarily actively planning to implement. The source who shared the survey with Ars, who asked not to be identified for fear of retaliation, described these options as the "most troubling" of a much larger set of potential features described in the survey.
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