Amazon-owned smart home company Ring is facing more allegations of illicit surveillance after internal emails revealed plans for the Search Party feature to go beyond the cutesy, public-facing preface of finding lost dogs.
Emails unearthed by 404 Media purportedly reveal the company’s founder and CEO telling staff about plans to expand Search Party to help Ring “zero out crime in neighbourhoods.” And, perhaps the odd bit of vandalism and lawn soiling, we don’t think our four legged friends are the ones committing the crimes. It suggests the company may be planning to use this feature to surveil humans.
“I believe that the foundation we created with Search Party, first for finding dogs, will end up becoming one of the most important pieces of tech and innovation to truly unlock the impact of our mission,” Siminoff wrote in the email sent in October. “You can now see a future where we are able to zero out crime in neighborhoods. So many things to do to get there but for the first time ever we have the chance to fully complete what we started.”
Ring caused alarm with its Super Bowl commercial advertising Search Party as a way to recover lost pets. Critics described the ad as “genuinely soft launching the surveillance state.”
The company also recently rolled out its Familiar Faces tool, which uses AI to identify regular visitors to the property in order to cut down on the number of notifications people receive. The Electronic Frontier Foundation said at the time that “today’s feature to recognise your friend at your front door can easily be repurposed tomorrow for mass surveillance,” and highlighted the company’s partnerships with police forces and companies working on behalf of the Trump Administration.
Last month the company denied directly sharing video footage with ICE immigration officials in the United States via its Community Requests tools via partnership with a third-party company. Reports that a pending partnership with a company called Flock had activists advising Ring owners to tear down their cameras and video doorbells.
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