Neighbourhood Watch: Growing unease over smart doorbells

Given the potential $10m price-tag, a Super Bowl ad spot doesn't tend to be the place to unveil a minor product or feature.

Generally it’s a sure sign that a company has high hopes for whatever it’s selling.

So when the CEO of Amazon’s Ring, Jamie Siminoff, appeared on screens around the US in early February to unveil 'Search Party’, you knew they meant business.

According to the ad, Search Party was a new way of using the company’s technology to help people find their lost dogs.

The idea was that, instead of putting up ‘Missing’ posters or sharing photos on the local WhatsApp group, you could now upload a photo to the Ring app - along with a short description of the dog.

Once you do that, information is automatically sent on to a network of Ring doorbells – which then use AI to start scanning for glimpses of your dog.

Essentially, the system starts to monitor the video feeds from countless nearby Ring doorbells and security cameras to try to spot a glimpse of a dog that matches the information you’ve given it. If it does, it can then notify and help you reunite with your furry friend.

And the feature was automatically enabled for Amazon Ring users – as part of the ‘Neighbours’ feature that is designed to allow people to share alerts and warnings with other nearby Ring owners.

And in the ad Jamie Siminoff announced that the feature was also available completely free – so you didn’t even have to be a premium subscriber to avail of it. In fact you didn’t even have to be a Ring user – others could upload their dog’s details to the service without a camera.

The All Seeing Eyes

We don’t know how many Ring doorbells Search Party might be availing of when trying to locate a canine companion.

The company does not report how many devices have been sold – in the US alone or globally – and even total sales figures wouldn’t necessarily tell you how many are actually in use at any one time.

But survey data suggests that Ring doorbells are quite common in the US at least.

One suggests around one third of households in the US have some form of doorbell camera and, of those, the Ring doorbell is the most popular, with around a 40% share.

If that is representative, and with some simple maths applied, it would suggest that roughly 14-15% of US homes are using a Ring doorbell today. That’s around 20 million homes.

There are a few caveats to add to that, though.

One is that these kinds of doorbells tend to be more popular in urban areas rather than rural areas - so you might have some neighbourhoods with a much higher percentage, and then other parts where they’re incredibly rare.

Some users may also have their ‘Neighbourhood’ feature deactivated – meaning their camera is not meant to be available to ‘Search Party’.

It’s also worth pointing out that while we think of smart doorbells when we think of Ring, they do make other kinds of cameras too – including more traditional external security cameras.

(They also make indoor cameras to allow people to monitor a specific room… including the one where their dog is while they’re away from home).

Dog Gone

But it’s fair to say that Search Party hasn’t gotten the reaction Amazon had hoped for.

Very quickly the online discourse around the feature turned negative – as people accused the company of literally putting a cute and cuddly front onto something that could have a far darker application.

Because if Search Party was capable of quietly activating a Ring camera to automatically search for something like a dog – probably without the actual owner of the camera even knowing – then it wasn’t much of a stretch to imagine it using the same technology to search for something else. Or someone else.

Many suggested such a tool could eventually be utilised by law enforcement to find wanted people – or simply scour an area for potential suspects.

Critics argued that launching Search Party the way they did was a gentle way to acclimatise users to something that would otherwise seem off-putting and even dystopian.

Pets were the way to do that, they say, because it dehumanises the feature. After all, people are probably less concerned about a dog’s privacy than a human’s. At the same time, pets tend to be a bit of a weakness for many, and dog-lovers are likely to be okay with something like this if they think it’ll keep their pets happy and healthy.

And while that might seem like a cynical stance, people’s mistrust of Amazon’s motives wasn’t entirely unjustified.

Because the announcement around Search Party came just a few months after Ring had announced a partnership with a company called Flock – which specialises in cameras for law enforcement and the likes of licence plate scanners.

That partnership was supposed to allow Flock users – generally the likes of police departments – to request footage from Ring users, and make it easier for those users to share that if they chose to do so.

And of course all of this was happening against a backdrop of the White House’s immigration crackdown, and a number of controversies around the tactics being utilised by ICE.

So it fed into a growing unease in the US around law enforcement and how they might take advantage of what people would consider to be private data.

In the end – just days after the Super Bowl ad aired – Amazon announced that it and Flock had mutually agreed to cancel their planned partnership. They said that, as it hadn’t actually begun, no footage had been shared between the two platforms.

Search Party, though, is still very much available in the US.

Not for EU

This controversy is confined to the US at the moment – largely because Search Party is only available there right now.

Realistically it’s unlikely that it will see the light of day in Europe any time soon, if ever.

For a start the EU has far more onerous rules and regulations around people’s data than you tend to see in the US – built around the General Data Protection Regulation that big tech companies have regularly complained about.

That places a far higher standard on what all companies do with users data – there’s very little they can do without the express consent of the user, for example, and they have to be transparent about the data they hold on an individual.

The rules also effectively prohibit untargeted surveillance – the kind that might involve having lots of cameras constantly watching just in case something or someone of interest comes into view.

Meanwhile the EU’s more recently-agreed AI Act also prohibits the use of automated scanning of surveillance footage.

Both of those together make it very difficult to see a way in which Ring’s Search Party feature becomes available here.

Stranger danger

But there is a separate Ring feature that is available in Europe, and is causing controversy in its own right.

The ‘Familiar Faces’ feature launched in the US last year and became available in certain EU countries earlier this year – including the UK, Germany and France.

Part of Ring’s premium subscription service, it uses AI facial recognition to, as the name suggests, identify faces that are familiar to users, and ones that are not. And it doesn’t just activate when someone presses the doorbell – it can pick up on faces of people that come relatively close to camera.

That does make it seem like it’s in the same realm at least as Search Party.

But the fact that it’s done on a camera-by-camera basis is likely what makes the difference here in terms of it complying with GDPR. It’s not networking all of the cameras in the way the Search Party is.

That being said, there are concerns that the data the feature is gathering is being collated on some level.

A few weeks ago a class action suit was filed in the US relating to Familiar Faces, alleging that Amazon is classifying and storing people’s biometric data – their facial features – for up to six months, without necessarily getting their consent or explaining how that data might be used.

And the case points to the fact that the feature is more restrictive in places like Portland, Oregon and Texas – which have tighter rules around gathering biometric data – as proof that it is gathering and storing more than it needs to.

Amazon hasn’t commented on that case and, as it was only filed a few weeks ago, it has yet to be tested within the legal system.

Private Eye

The features have once again raised questions about what Ring doorbells – and rival devices from the likes of Google, Yale, Tado and Arlo – can do, and who has access to that.

In the past Amazon had partnered with US law enforcement to make it easier for them to request videos from users. At first that could be done as a blanket request – and later they were given the option of asking on the Neighbours app.

Following pressure from privacy advocates, though, gaining access now requires a formal application – and, generally, a warrant.

That is what applies in Ireland, too, meaning An Garda Síochána do not have easy access to a person’s camera feed or stored videos.

Of course there are valid reasons why the likes of the Gardaí might want to get access to camera footage in a particular area or belonging to a particular reason.

And there is nothing to stop them from asking people directly for footage – or putting out appeals, as is often now a feature of Gardaí communications relating to road traffic incidents or other investigations.

Often people are only happy to share footage they’ve captured, too.

Local WhatsApp and Facebook groups are often full of clips that residents share, showing someone behaving suspiciously on their road.

Big Brother is Watching

The controversy does also highlight just how surrounded we are by cameras nowadays.

Not just camera doorbells, but also the likes of dashcams, smartphones and smart glasses.

Because while Amazon’s Ring is the best-known provider, there are many others selling camera doorbells and other security cameras nowadays.

And when an individual – or even everyone on a particular road - has a security camera – the attraction and use case is clear, while the downside is relatively small.

But what’s perhaps most important to these modern camera is the fact that they tend to be networked.

When they’re all connected back to their own servers – and potentially to each other – and they’re all able to store data for prolonged periods of time, the potential privacy implications suddenly become huge.

If pieced together, it means that there is now far more potential for surveillance than the State would ever be capable of through things like CCTV.

That has also led to concerns about the growth of what are called ‘intelligence as a service’ companies. In the past you might expect that the gathering of intelligence was done by State agencies – like the Gardaí – but now huge amounts of data is essentially being gathered by private firms, via the products that consumers are using.

And that may prove to be very valuable in many circumstances.

This means that it is more important than ever to ensure the right safeguards and regulations are in place, to ensure people’s very understandable wish to improve their security and peace of mind is balanced out against everyone’s right to privacy.