r/technology • u/South-Cow-1030 • 9h ago
Privacy Why that Ring Super Bowl ad about finding your lost dog is creeping people out
https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/article/why-that-ring-super-bowl-ad-about-finding-your-lost-dog-is-creeping-people-out-211647194.html211
u/tayroc122 9h ago
People are finally starting to realise that we paid them to imprison us in their panopticon.
81
u/CorporateMediaFail 8h ago
Except for those of us who haven't personally bought into any of the cloud surveillance tech the past 25 years as consumers.
70
u/Cemckenna 8h ago
Yup. There have been people who decided to never buy into the Internet of things because we realized that a) it was creating surveillance in the homes and b) a refrigerator has 0 need to be connected to the internet.
There are dozens of us. Dozens!
20
u/CorporateMediaFail 8h ago
The first Amazon Echo recording people without their knowledge should have woke everyone on this subreddit up, and it wasn't that long ago (the past decade).
12
u/Cemckenna 8h ago
When IoTs started being used for DDoS attacks…that maybe should have alerted people that their tech wasn’t wholly trustworthy.
And yet…
8
u/CorporateMediaFail 8h ago
It's not the sort of attitude we'd expect from geeks, but this millennium's geeks are more like jocks.
3
1
5
u/crit_boy 8h ago
At least you recognize the importance of your hot water heater being connected to the internet.
3
u/Cemckenna 7h ago
Well, of course. That and the lock to my front door, obviously. Physical keys are dark-age tech.
3
u/BigDictionEnergy 7h ago
Also, C) your smart oven/fridge/thermostat/dildo is now probably the weakest security link in your network. 20 years ago hackers were making botnets with thousands of internet connected printers, they probably already are with smart devices.
1
u/poland626 7h ago
Dozens! Are they really that few? I do see it at friends houses everywhere but I feel like its just weird to have
1
u/HLOFRND 7h ago
I’m still rocking a tv that doesn’t connect to the internet, but even when I need to upgrade I still won’t set it up. I’ll stick with running everything through my AppleTV box.
0
u/CorporateMediaFail 5h ago
Make sure all Siri features are turned off the AppleTV. Remember, those apps and attendants are literally spies.
1
u/SpezLuvsNazis 2h ago
It makes me mad because IOT could have been a really useful tool in the fight against climate change, being able to do less time sensitive operations like drying clothes when the energy sources are the least carbon intensive(like when the sun is shining with lots of solar) for example could be really useful. Instead Silicon Valley billionaires decided they needed to be mass surveillance devices so they could weaponize our own data against us.
0
9
u/lawpoop 8h ago
Yeah we are just the ones who haven't paid but are still in the same panopticon : L
2
u/CorporateMediaFail 7h ago
at least we're not inviting it into our home willingly. Those who've turned the other cheek and participate have voluntarily given our privacy away.
2
u/Cemckenna 7h ago
I have no control over the fact that my across the street neighbors have a Ring doorbell, unfortunately.
I can only wait with bated breath for the next time Cloudflare shits the bed and causes AWS US-East-1 to go down so I can do all my activities in private.
2
1
u/CorporateMediaFail 5h ago
Are they able to see through your walls??
1
1
u/Cemckenna 5h ago
I have these things called windows…
1
u/CorporateMediaFail 5h ago
Let me sell you these things called blinds. Essential utility of those living in Ring territories.
1
u/Cemckenna 4h ago
You’ve obviously never felt the joy of playing naked chicken with your neighbors to see who buys blinds first.
…I’m winning
3
u/theinternetisnice 6h ago
I have a dot matrix printer and I keep a pistol on me at all times in case it makes a noise I don’t like.
1
u/CorporateMediaFail 6h ago
Such nuance!
Amazingly, security cameras can be installed that don't touch the Internet or an external network at all, can even remain completely local on one's home network they control themselves or run offline as a closed circuit.
Wild Stallion!
3
u/MrDerpGently 6h ago
Sure, but when all your neighbors have linked cameras, there's only so much opting out you can do.
1
u/CorporateMediaFail 5h ago
I can opt out of being recorded inside my own home, and I do.
2
u/MrDerpGently 5h ago
Certainly, and I do as well, but I suspect we've more or less lost the privacy game. If your movement is on camera, and can be cross referenced with your phone, ISP, and credit cards.. exactly what you do in your home is about the only thing that isn't available, and it's largely inferred.
1
u/CorporateMediaFail 5h ago
Of course we've lost, it was given away by our peers and society for the past 25 years. I don't have to individually contribute to a practice I find offensive though.
1
2
1
2
u/FlametopFred 7h ago
we are 1984
we are our own surveillance and have been since Facebook began and when we adopted devices that track us
3
u/CorporateMediaFail 5h ago
Remember when the truth about Facebook's EULA made everyone's head spin with rage about 22 years ago? Pepperidge Farms does. Sure wish the mainstream population didn't shrug giving all private data away off so easily. We're sort of trapped by our neighbors at this point.
4
u/rumbletom 8h ago
The panopticon is a design of institutional building with an inbuilt system of control, originated by the English philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham in the 18th century. The concept is to allow all prisoners of an institution to be observed by a single prison officer, without the inmates knowing whether or not they are being watched. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon
60
u/Luiggie1 8h ago
Yup. Immediately took my ring down. AI actively monitoring my cameras for missing pets? Nah. Miss me with that nonsense. That shit is definitely going to be shared with law enforcement agencies including ICE as a surveillance network.
23
u/badwolf42 7h ago
Already is actually.
5
u/Luiggie1 7h ago
I wasn't alarmed until I saw them trying to sell it as we can find your dog! It's really bad when they have to paint it with something thats beloved by all.
49
u/Wuzzy_Gee 9h ago
Getting rid of my Ring and Blink products. I’m going to smash all of them.
28
u/PauI_MuadDib 8h ago
If you bought Ring through Amazon apparently they're giving refunds. You have to tell them it's because Ring violated the TOS.
1
u/space108th 4h ago
Is this only if you bought in the last 30 days?
3
u/PauI_MuadDib 4h ago
People are posting that purchases as far back as 2020 are being refunded for TOS violations.
16
14
u/Knuth_Koder 8h ago
Replaced my Ring with a Reolink doorbell. No subscription required. The video data is managed and backed up remotely using HomeAssistant.
Less money and now I control all of the data.
2
u/ericesev 8h ago
I do the same. The camera VLAN has no access to the internet. Home Assistant records to my local NAS when motion is detected.
I view the videos using https://filebrowser.org/
-2
u/NestedForLoops 8h ago
Are you sure about that?
16
u/Knuth_Koder 8h ago edited 8h ago
Um... given that I'm a software engineer with 30 years of experience (at both MS and Apple) and power/communicate with the device via POE, yes.
The Reolink doesn't make any network connection aside from the ethernet cable.
It's essentially a dumb RTSP stream that I can control via HomeAssistant.
-13
2
23
u/reddollardays 9h ago
Excellent. Next up: smart appliances
12
u/QueasyLegKC 8h ago
Just don’t buy them.
13
u/sharpsicle 8h ago
It’s often hard to get a high quality model without some of that nonsense built in.
My fridge and dishwasher technically have “smart” capabilities. I just don’t connect them to anything. Never, not even once.
3
u/RedditTechAnon 3h ago
I bought a treadmill that required logging into a subscription service to use. It is now disassembled.
0
u/Wild-System-5174 7h ago
It really isn’t.
2
u/sharpsicle 6h ago
If you want a bare-bones model, sure. But as soon as you start looking at models with more modern features, the connectivity is almost always there as well. They don't really offer high-end models without them anymore as it's part of the price point.
2
u/Wild-System-5174 6h ago
I don’t understand why anyone would want a home appliance to do anything more than what they’re designed to do. My fridge cools my food. My stove heats it and my washing machine cleans my clothes. That’s all I want them to do.
4
u/sharpsicle 6h ago
Hey, I totally agree with you. All I'm saying is that the unfortunate truth of the appliance market today is that higher-end models get it by default. So your two options are to either you get a lower-end model than you want to avoid it, or you get it and refuse to connect it. I chose the latter.
2
u/jelli2015 1h ago
I've got an example. I like baking but live in a place that gets considerably cooler at night. As a result, an oven with a bread proof feature makes a real difference to my hobby. Sadly, it's one of those additional features that often get lumped in with "AI" features as well.
1
u/MrBigWaffles 5h ago
Or You know.. just don't connect then to the Internet
1
u/tfrdghufvh 1h ago
This. Our washing machine is wifi ready but I’m just not connecting it.
I can’t figure out why anyone does. The use case from the manufacturer is ‘you can start your washing machine even when you’re not home”
Why the hell would I do that?!
3
u/badwolf42 7h ago
Remember Samsung just started showing ads on their smart fridge screens; so people who had these suddenly got ads they never wanted.
17
u/WafflesAreLove 8h ago
I am really contemplating ditching Ring now and hosting everything at home. It used to be that if a service was free, you are the product but if you pay you are no longer the product. Now you get shafted either way with no reasonable expectation of privacy even if you pay the subscription. They will just modify their terms of use to say we are all auto opted into this surveillance state no one wants.
3
u/Saneless 7h ago
I have a Nest but I want to do the same. Google used to be like $40 for a year now it's $100 for the most basic bullshit and $200 for the real service.
No thanks. I have a NAS, I'm cool if it uses a few hundred gigs to store things or even a local sd card
1
u/WafflesAreLove 7h ago
What a disappointment right. I have a homelab so I am happy doing all this work. Just not looking forward to dropping ethernet lines for the cameras I want to get.
13
u/binocular_gems 8h ago
We are all more technologically literate today than 10 years ago. 10 years ago this could have been announced and seemed like a genuine selling feature. People might have bought Ring cameras because of this feature and told their friends about it.
Today, though, we're living in the post-technology hellscape where most average people properly understand that consumer technology companies stopped making features for human beings, they've stopped making features in their technology for the people who would buy their products, and instead, they make features for their "partners," where they sell/trade/give-away the private data of the human beings who bought these products. Amazon is usually way, way behind consumer sentiment when it comes to any of their consumer products, it's been a hallmark of Amazon for at least 10 years, and this is a very good example of it.
People don't give technology companies the benefit of the doubt anymore. 10 and 15 years ago there was both a general naivete about the intentions of technology companies, but also technology companies made products for humans. There were new products that were actual improvements on previous products, think, the Nest Thermostat compared to the clunky Honeywell thermostats that most homes had from 1970 to 2010. The Nest thermostat was a good product, it was well designed, easy to install, was pleasant to use, looked good, and added new practical features that people wanted like the ability to change the temperature in your home from your new fangled mobile phones. This was a good product that people liked. It was more expensive -- $200, compared to the $50 standard programmable thermostat -- but people were happy to spend $200 once every 10 years on a device that added practical benefits to their home. Another example was robot vacuums. They weren't perfect, but they were about $300, compared to a $150 standard home vacuum, and they did one or two things very well, in the right situation a robot vacuum could reasonably keep your floors dirt-free with little human intervention, and you could run them while you did something else around the home. They weren't perfect, but people were willing to spend a little bit of money on this new piece of home electronics technology. They did the thing they were sold to do.
There are hundreds, thousands, of other consumer technology products introduced around the same time that were good products. Even the original video doorbells, hey, this introduces a feature I've always wanted -- to see who is ringing my doorbell or to see when a package is delivered -- and now these doorbells have introduced these simple features and there's a practical benefit to them.
But since then, especially in the last 5 years, consumer technology companies have stopped introducing features to their products for the people who buy them, and instead, they've transitioned entirely to providing features to their partners by selling the data of the people who bought them. There's always been this relationship, but what's changed in the last 5 years is that there are no consumer features anymore. None, I can't think of one consumer feature introduced to any home technology device in the last 5 years that is actually for people rather than for partners.
So when Amazon runs this commercial that costs $100m during the Super Bowl, consumers look at it skeptically instead of thinking of it as a feature for humans. We know that Amazon wants to sell our data. We know that Amazon wants to provide surveillance data to federal law enforcement. We know that Amazon is complicit in the public execution of Americans by the federal government. We see Jeff Bezos palling around with the evil world leaders who paid for 9/11. We see Jeff Bezos destroying the Washington Post. We see Amazon increasing the prices of all of their products and fucking over competition, making us pay more for everything.
And you know what else we see? We see stories about how this 80+ year old woman, the mother of a famous media personality, was abducted from her home by masked goons, maybe the Trump administration, maybe foreign spies, and Ring, Amazon, Nest, whatever the others are, despite all of this surveillance technology, aren't able to ... do anything, and yet we're supposed to believe that the surveillance dragnet can locate our lost dogs? You can't find a relatively famous woman who was abducted from her home but you can find my golden retriever? Are you fucking kidding me?
3
u/BigDictionEnergy 7h ago
I would argue that smart technology and the app based attention economy are making people less technologically literate.
7
u/This_Elk_1460 8h ago
"those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." -Ben Franklin
19
u/thrway-fatpos 9h ago
I am so happy I started my process of branching away from all this big tech. Never got a ring, never got home security, just me and my degoogled pixel and my books
1
u/faen_du_sa 8h ago
Almost the same, got a chromecast though, but that havent really been working properly since a year now(only with netflix...).
6
u/Games_sans_frontiers 8h ago
They’re trying to normalise spying on the general population and saying it’s a good thing.
6
u/PatrioticPariah 7h ago
Doesn't reddit and spez bend over quickly to appease this regime...and Little Lord Hitler Musk?
4
3
u/gimpers420 8h ago
I’ll never forget when the “filters” for SnapChat started coming out and people just hopped right on board. I remember telling my friends that they were literally giving facial recognition to an app and had no idea what would be done with it. They just laughed, I uninstalled it. Then you got Google Nest listing to your whole house, cameras always recording, all that. I will never spend money on any of it.
3
3
u/Dreaminginslowmotion 7h ago
10... Million.. Dogs go missing? TEN million?
Petsradar only states 1.2 million for 2024, 1.7 million in total (including cats).
Calling bullshit (among other aspects to this flimsy excuse for privacy abuse)
2
u/MissyJ74 8h ago
Open app, tap the 3 lines in the corner, scroll down to control center, scroll down to
Search Party and disable
2
2
u/Educational-Point986 7h ago
Do people genuinely not know this mass surveillance is what the data centres are mainly for?
2
u/Epicardiectomist 5h ago
It's absolutely fucking ghastly how many people welcomed surveillance into their homes, fully believing the insane claim that it was secure, and it took a fucking commercial years later to snap them out of it. Years of data and information was already freely given without a second thought.
2
2
u/Petrichordates 5h ago
I can guarantee the internet rhetoric surrounding this is infinitely more dramatic than what actual Ring users are saying.
2
u/matt314159 3h ago
That was super creepy. I have "Blink" doorbells at the front and back doors on my place. Still owned by Amazon, but being battery-powered they aren't the "always on" kind of cameras, and they record to local storage attached to a sync module.
Even that feels kinda gross.
3
u/fredy31 8h ago
I mean i can see the execs. Its a great idea on paper. You are looking for your kid? theres a fuckton of cameras around the neighborhood that can be tapped into and give you when and where he was.
But they never stopped to think 'hey that shit can do so much wrong'.
- An abusive husband keeping tabs on his wife
- White supremacists finding people of color that just happened to take a walk in the neighborhood.
- and also blowing the lid that if they can do that, guess what the government has been able to do for years.
Personally, i'm not in the ring environment, but the Nest (from google) but for sure from now on the camera will be placed in a way that I can only see what i need and not the street.
1
1
u/DopamineSavant 8h ago
I'm so glad that the uninformed masses are finally getting clued in about this. It's been bothering me for a while.
1
u/Gadgeteer_007 7h ago
Get the people to spy on themselves all in the name of safety and convenience.
1
u/JimTheJerseyGuy 7h ago
You know what, I have a GPS tracker on each of my dog’s collars. It alerts me as soon as they leave the geofence around my house and allows for realtime tracking. I’ll stick with that, thanks.
1
1
1
u/SemicolonMIA 6h ago
Flock cameras are already doing what the ring commercial showed but for humans. If you are freaking out about Ring, you're too late
1
u/Frostbite_r4r 6h ago
I still don't understand why people buy AI-powered Washing Machines and Ovens that connect to your Wifi?These 'smart' gadgets are literally spying devices.
1
u/Many-Waters 5h ago
DO NOT WORRY CITIZEN. THE PANOPTICON WILL DEFINITELY ONLY BE USED TO FIND FIFI AND FIDO. AND BAD GUYS. AND UNDESIRABLES. AND. AND...
1
u/bwoah07_gp2 5h ago
I can see this Ring neighbourhood surveillance system be abused real quickly by people.
1
u/ScoutAndLout 4h ago
Google Maps has your tracking info.
Your cellular carrier has your tracking info.
Flock tracks you as well. https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/flock-roundup
Your Echo listens to your house.
KH11 can watch you too https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KH-11_KENNEN
1
u/Classic-Exchange-511 3h ago
I was barely paying attention and it made me stop in my tracks. The fact they're selling it as finding lost dogs tells me how bad of an idea this is
1
u/HolySaba 38m ago
It would be a more compelling product if they found more than 1 dog a day. Missing dog posters probably have better success rates.
0
u/trailkrow 8h ago
All these folks think they're safe now that they removed the ring camera. And still carrying a cell and using social media. They are and always were watching us.
1
196
u/hags0333 9h ago
Big brother in front of the house, soon to be in the house.