Ring Cancels Flock Deal After Dystopian Super Bowl Ad Prompts Mass Outrage
hubie writes:
"This is definitely not about dogs," senator says, urging a pause on Ring face scans:
Amazon and Flock Safety have ended a partnership that would've given law enforcement access to a vast web of Ring cameras.
The decision came after Amazon faced substantial backlash for airing a Super Bowl ad that was meant to be warm and fuzzy, but instead came across as disturbing and dystopian.
The ad begins with a young girl surprised to receive a puppy as a gift. It then warns that 10 million dogs go missing annually. Showing a series of lost dog posters, the ad introduces a new "Search Party" feature for Ring cameras that promises to revolutionize how neighbors come together to locate missing pets.
At that point, the ad takes a "creepy" turn, Sen. Ed Markey (D.-Mass.) told Amazon CEO Andy Jassy in a letter urging changes to enhance privacy at the company.
Illustrating how a single Ring post could use AI to instantly activate searchlights across an entire neighborhood, the ad shocked critics like Markey, who warned that the same technology could easily be used to "surveil and identify humans."
Markey suggested that in blasting out this one frame of the ad to Super Bowl viewers, Amazon "inadvertently revealed the serious privacy and civil liberties risks attendant to these types of Artificial Intelligence-enabled image recognition technologies."
In his letter, Markey also shared new insights from his prior correspondence with Amazon that he said exposed a wide range of privacy concerns. Ring cameras can "collect biometric information on anyone in their video range," he said, "without the individual's consent and often without their knowledge." Among privacy risks, Markey warned that Ring owners can retain swaths of biometric data, including face scans, indefinitely. And anyone wanting face scans removed from Ring cameras has no easy solution and is forced to go door to door to request deletions, Markey said.
On social media, other critics decried Amazon's ad as "awfully dystopian," declaring it was "disgusting to use dogs to normalize taking away our freedom to walk around in public spaces." Some feared the technology would be more likely to benefit police and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers than families looking for lost dogs.
Amazon's partnership with Flock, announced last October as coming soon, only inflamed those fears. So did the company's recent rollout of a feature using facial recognition technology called "Familiar Faces"-which Markey considers so invasive, he has demanded that the feature be paused.
"What this ad doesn't show: Ring also rolled out facial recognition for humans," Markey posted on X. "I wrote to them months ago about this. Their answer? They won't ask for your consent. This definitely isn't about dogs-it's about mass surveillance."
[...] But while Ring may have hurt its brand, WebProNews, which reports on business strategy in the tech industry, suggested that "the fallout may prove more consequential for Flock Safety than for Ring." For Flock, the Ring partnership represented a meaningful expansion of their business and "data collection capabilities," WebProNews reported. And because this all happened around one of the most-watched TV events of the year, other tech companies may be more hesitant to partner with Flock after Amazon dropped the integration and privacy advocates witnessed the seeming power of their collective outrage.
[...] Ring's statements so far do not "acknowledge the real issue," Scott-Railton said, which is privacy risks. For Ring, it seemed like a missed opportunity to discuss or introduce privacy features to reassure concerned users, he suggested, noting the backlash showed "Americans want more control of their privacy right now" and "are savvy enough to see through sappy dog pics."
"Stop trying to build a surveillance dystopia consumers didn't ask for" and "focus on shipping good, private products," Scott-Railton said.
He also suggested that lawmakers should take note of the grassroots support that could possibly help pass laws to push back on mass surveillance. That could help block not just a potential future partnership with Flock, but possibly also stop Ring from becoming the next Flock.
Read more of this story at SoylentNews.