Doorbell Cams Draw New Wave Of Surveillance Fears
This week, Google Nest and Amazon-owned Ring stoked concerns about the line between good neighbor and Big Brother when it comes to doorbell cameras.
On Tuesday, the FBI released Nest footage of a masked person on Nancy Guthrie’s stoop on the night of her abduction. The clip could be a major case development, but it also prompted questions about how authorities extracted it—mainly because the local sheriff said Guthrie’s doorbell camera was disconnected as part of the crime and she didn’t have a subscription for cloud video storage:
- FBI Director Kash Patel said officials worked with “private sector partners” to retrieve footage from “backend systems.”
- Google hasn’t commented, but its privacy policy mentions that some Nest models can capture video when offline, the Associated Press noted.
Days earlier, Ring’s Super Bowl commercial promoted a new AI feature that can scrub a neighborhood’s footage to find a lost dog using a pet’s photo, which many viewers decried as a guise for state surveillance. The dog-finding feature can’t currently detect “human biometrics,” a Ring spokesperson told The Verge, but another new Ring feature called Familiar Faces can. The company’s CEO recently said that neighborhood cameras could help “zero out crime” within a year.
Still…Ring’s puppy play was the second-most-liked Super Bowl ad, according to iSpot surveys.—ML
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