What if the biggest threat to your safety and privacy isn’t a person, but a device millions of Americans have installed in their homes willingly?
That’s the contention of tech critics at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who say Amazon’s Ring doorbell devices constitute a “surveillance nightmare” — what they’re calling the largest civilian surveillance panopticon in the history of the United States.
The pitch is that Ring doorbells help homeowners watch out for porch pirates and incoming trick-or-treaters. But they do so, the digital rights advocacy group charges, at a staggering cost to your privacy. For example, Ring has previously been sued by the Federal Trade Commission for illegally collecting and storing audio and video data between 2017 and 2020. That particular issue came to a head in 2023, after the company was found to give employees extensive access to footage captured by Ring devices — including for cameras inside people’s homes.
And sure, you could argue, that wouldn’t be an issue if you simply use the company’s devices on your porch. Not even that’s a safe bet, however. Back in 2022, Consumer Reports found that Ring doorbells could record ambient audio from 20 feet away — allowing them to listen in on pedestrians, neighbors, and in some cases, even in on homeowners who keep their doors or windows open.
All of this feeds into what the EFF calls the “digital porch-to-police pipeline,” where tech enables paranoid homeowners to make snap judgements about who does or doesn’t belong in their neighborhood and easily dispatch police to confront them. Indeed, since at least 2016, Ring has made it a point to loop law enforcement agencies like the Los Angeles Police Department into its business through free giveaways and warrantless access to user footage.
As research fellow at Harvard Kennedy School Chris Gilliard told Consumer Reports, any surveillance devices will disproportionately impact those who already face the highest amount of repression from law enforcement — like Black and immigrant communities. “That’s a truism of surveillance: It’s going to fall earliest and most often on the marginalized,” Gilliard said.
And with Ring’s recently announced “Search Party” function, in which Ring can track down a dog by chaining multiple devices together, things are looking even more dystopian. In a statement, Ring said it “built the feature with strong privacy protections from the start,” allowing owners to “choose on a case-by-case basis whether they want to share videos with a pet owner to support a reunion.”
Yet as the EFF points out, the devices already have a baked-in facial recognition feature for humans. Simply put, it’s not hard to imagine a world where Ring and tech like it makes privacy in public impossible. Maybe the right question to ask isn’t whether Ring will build it — but whether we’ll notice before the panopticon becomes irreversible.
One thing’s for sure: the pressure’s getting to Ring. After backlash to the company’s disastrous Super Bowl ad, it announced that it’s canceling its partnership with Flock, a controversial surveillance startup that would have looped its cameras into an even larger network.
More on surveillance: Officials Deploying AI Surveillance Devices in School Bathrooms
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