Normalizing surveillance under the banner of helping lost pets
Now, surveillance doesn’t arrive announcing itself as surveillance. It shows up wagging its tail, asking for help, and hoping you won’t notice that the cameras never stop looking.
The product manager behind Ring/Amazon’s expanded “Search Party” feature may actually care about pet safety and animal kindness: a lost dog, a community alert that helps find the lost pup. What it really does is further normalize a private surveillance network that conditions people to accept constant monitoring, expanded data sharing, and passive participation in a system they don’t control waiting to be used against them.
Ring just announced that the feature will be made available to all Ring customers, even those who don’t own a Ring camera. According to Ring, the company has helped “bring home more than a dog a day” since it launched.
Search Party uses AI to find potential matches for lost dogs using footage from your neighbors’ cameras. You can report a lost dog in the Ring app, and nearby outdoor cameras will use AI to scan for dogs. If a match is found, the camera owner receives an alert and can choose to share related clips with the missing pet owner. There’s also an option to call the neighbor or send a message without sharing their phone number.
Now you just have to have the Ring Neighbors app to use the feature.
“Now, pet owners can mobilize the whole community—and communities are empowered to help—to find lost pets more effectively than ever before,” Ring founder Jamie Siminoff said in the announcement. “That’s why we believe it’s so important to make this feature available to anyone who shares a lost dog post in Neighbors.”
In Los Angeles, I had to sign over Police access to my exterior surveillance cameras so the alarm system would be tied to an LAPD response. They also have some ability to use the interior cameras if the exterior ones signal an alert. Now, surveillance doesn’t arrive announcing itself as surveillance. It shows up wagging its tail, asking for help, and hoping you won’t notice that the cameras never stop looking.
> You can report a lost dog in the Ring app, and nearby outdoor cameras will use AI to scan for dogs.
what if the lost dog looks a lot like a partner one suspects of cheating on one? ("or like spider-man around october 31st?")
Crikey, people really have no idea, do they? What do they think these cameras will be used for? There is already a British minister who thinks the panopticon is the way to go everyone watched all the time. Now all we need is the pre-crime department.