Amazon’s smart doorbell maker Ring has terminated a partnership with police surveillance tech company Flock Safety.
The announcement follows a backlash that erupted after a 30-second Ring ad that aired during the Super Bowl featuring a lost dog that is found through a network of cameras, sparking fears of a dystopian surveillance society.
But that feature, called Search Party, was not related to Flock. And Ring’s announcement does not cite the ad as a reason for the “joint decision” for the cancellation.
hoto: AP
Ring and Flock said last year they were planning on working together to give Ring camera owners the option to share their video footage in response to law enforcement requests made through a Ring feature known as Community Requests.
“Following a comprehensive review, we determined the planned Flock Safety integration would require significantly more time and resources than anticipated,” Ring’s statement said. “The integration never launched, so no Ring customer videos were ever sent to Flock Safety.”
Flock reiterated that it never received Ring customer videos — and that ending the planned integration was a mutual decision that allows both companies to “best serve their respective customers.”
In a statement, Flock added that it “remains dedicated to supporting law enforcement agencies with tools that are fully configurable to local laws and policies.”
Flock is one of the nation’s biggest operators of automated license-plate reading systems. Its cameras are mounted in thousands of communities across the US, capturing billions of photos of license plates each month. The company has faced public outcry amid the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration enforcement crackdown.
However, Flock maintains that it does not partner with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), or contract out with any subagency of the Department of Homeland Security for direct access to its cameras. The company paused pilot programs with Customs and Border Protection and Homeland Security Investigations last year.
Still, Flock says it does not own the data captured by its cameras, its customers do. So if a police department, for example, chooses to collaborate with a federal agency like ICE, “Flock has no ability to override that decision,” the company notes on its Web site.
Beyond the Flock partnership, Amazon has faced other surveillance concerns over its Ring doorbell cameras.
In the Super Bowl ad, a lost dog is found with Ring’s Search Party feature, which the company says can “reunite lost dogs with their families and track wildfires threatening your community.” The clip depicts the dog being tracked by cameras throughout a neighborhood using artificial intelligence.
Viewers took to social media to criticize it for being sinister, leaving many wondering if it would be used to track humans and saying they would turn the feature off.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit that focus on civil liberties related to digital technology, said this week that Americans should feel unsettled over the potential loss of privacy.
“Amazon Ring already integrates biometric identification, like face recognition, into its products via features like ‘Familiar Faces’ which depends on scanning the faces of those in sight of the camera and matching it against a list of pre-saved, pre-approved faces,” the Foundation wrote on Tuesday. “It doesn’t take much to imagine Ring eventually combining these two features: face recognition and neighborhood searches.”
Democratic Senator Edward Markey of Massachusetts also urged Amazon to discontinue its “Familiar Faces” technology.
In a published letter addressed to Amazon CEO Andrew Jassy, Markey wrote that the backlash to the Super Bowl commercial “confirmed public opposition to Ring’s constant monitoring and invasive image recognition algorithms.”
HORMUZ ISSUE: The US president said he expected crude prices to drop at the end of the war, which he called a ‘minor excursion’ that could continue ‘for a little while’ The United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Kuwait started reducing oil production, as the near-closure of the crucial Strait of Hormuz ripples through energy markets and affects global supply. Abu Dhabi National Oil Co (ADNOC) is “managing offshore production levels to address storage requirements,” the company said in a statement, without giving details. Kuwait Petroleum Corp said it was lowering production at its oil fields and refineries after “Iranian threats against safe passage of ships through the Strait of Hormuz.” The war in the Middle East has all but closed Hormuz, the narrow waterway linking the Persian Gulf to the open seas,
RATIONING: The proposal would give the Trump administration ample leverage to negotiate investments in the US as it decides how many chips to give each country US officials are debating a new regulatory framework for exporting artificial intelligence (AI) chips and are considering requiring foreign nations to invest in US AI data centers or security guarantees as a condition for granting exports of 200,000 chips or more, according to a document seen by Reuters. The rules are not yet final and could change. They would be the first attempt to regulate the flow of AI chips to US allies and partners since US President Donald Trump’s administration said it rescinded its predecessor’s so-called AI diffusion rules. Those rules sought to keep a significant amount of AI
Apple Inc increased iPhone production in India by about 53 percent last year and now makes a quarter of its marquee devices there, reflecting the US company’s efforts to avoid tariffs on China. The company assembled about 55 million iPhones in India last year, up from 36 million a year earlier, people familiar with the matter said, asking not to be named because the numbers aren’t public. Apple makes about 220 million to 230 million iPhones a year globally, with India’s share of the total increasing rapidly. Apple has accelerated its expansion in the world’s most populous country in recent years, bolstered
A new worry has been rippling across the stock market lately: Entire businesses, not just their employees, might be thrown out of work. While most economists say fears of an artificial intelligence (AI) job apocalypse are overblown, seismic shifts have happened in the past after big tech breakthroughs. The IT revolution of the 1990s led to a surge in productivity that sped up the US economy for several years. It also rendered companies or even industries largely redundant — from travel agents and stockbrokers to classified advertising and newspapers, or video rental stores. Economists expect AI would deliver higher productivity,
RSS