• Amazon Ring’s Super Bowl ad offered a vision of our streets that should leave every person unsettled about the company’s goals for disintegrating our privacy in public. • In the ad, disguised as a heartfelt effort to reunite the lost dogs of the country with their innocent owners, the company previewed future surveillance of our streets: a world where biometric identification could be unleashed from consumer devices to identify, track, and locate anything - human, pet, and otherwise. • The ad for Ring’s “Search Party” feature highlighted the doorbell camera’s ability to scan footage across Ring devices in a neighborhood, using AI analysis to identify potential canine matches among the many personal devices within the network. • Amazon Ring already integrates biometric identification, like face recognition, into its products via features like “Familiar Faces,” which depends on scanning the faces of those in sight of the camera and matching it against a list of pre-saved, pre-approved faces. • It doesn’t take much to imagine Ring eventually combining these two features: face recognition and neighborhood searches. • Ring’s “Familiar Faces” feature could already run afoul of biometric privacy laws in some states, which require explicit, informed consent from individuals before a company can just run face recognition on someone.

Article Summaries:

  • Amazon Ring’s Super Bowl ad, titled “Search Party,” showcases a future where the company’s doorbell cameras use AI and biometric identification to scan neighborhood footage for lost pets-and potentially for any person or object. The ad highlights Ring’s existing “Familiar Faces” feature, which matches faces against a pre‑approved list, raising concerns that the new search capability could combine face recognition with neighborhood‑wide searches. Ring has a history of privacy issues, including an FTC settlement over employee access to customer footage and longstanding law‑enforcement partnerships that provide warrantless and direct access to recordings. The feature is enabled by default, requiring owners to manually disable it.

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