Leaked emails suggest Amazon plans mass surveillance via Ring smart cameras

Last October, Amazon’s subsidiary Ring unveiled a new AI-driven feature called Search Party, which can connect all Ring cameras within a neighbourhood to locate missing pets. Since this feature would allow Amazon to effectively create an automated surveillance network, it has drawn heavy criticism from privacy experts and specialist press.

404 Media recently obtained an email in which Ring founder Jamie Siminoff emphasised to employees that the Search Party feature would extend beyond pets and be used for combating crime. According to the message, the system is designed to completely eradicate crime in a neighbourhood. The system described by Jamie Siminoff amounts to private mass surveillance that would severely curtail the privacy of anyone near a Ring camera.

Besides Search Party, Ring also offers features that could transform smart home cameras into more powerful mass surveillance tools, including AI facial recognition and Community Requests – a function that grants law enforcement access to videos captured by Ring products. The company seems to believe that increased monitoring equates to greater safety. Yet the criticism surrounding these surveillance features wasn’t even mentioned once by the company founder in the emails. For now, at least, video feeds from Ring cameras won’t be shared without the permission of their respective owners.