Coyote Blog

During the Superbowl there was an amazing Rorschach test masquerading as a feel-good Ring doorbell commercial.  For those who missed it, find it here.  Essentially it touts a new service where neighborhood networks of Ring doorbell cameras can combine with Amazon AI to find a lost dog based on an uploaded photo.  Half the population reacted, "isn't that wonderful" and the other half of viewers, of whom I am one, reacted "that's freaking scary."  The network of camera feeds in the commercial looks very similar to Batman's (admitted even by him) dystopian cell phone surveillance array in the Dark Knight.

This is exactly the sort of wedge strategy that our public and private control freaks use to normalize dystopian systems and technologies.  You don't sell surveillance out of the gate with a system that tracks down a person in the neighborhood behind on taxes or child support.  No, you sell it as a system to find that adorable lost dog (notice not even generic pets or certainly not cats because dogs are the new children for this generation**).  They can fight all the backlash by saying, "Oh come on, who can be against finding lost dogs?"  Then, months or years later, the terms and conditions have morphed and broader search capabilities are enabled without the user even knowing (I own a Ring doorbell and I guarantee I never knew this feature was turned on by default or even existed). When it really gets scary, they are not even going to tell you about it.

I do not believe this is just a marketing mistake -- Ring appears to have adopted neighborhood surveillance as their core business model.  I have had a Ring doorbell for years and in its basic form of sending doorbell chimes to your phone and allowing you to see who is at the door and even talk to them remotely, it is a nice product.   I have always liked it.  But over the years I have noticed Amazon/Ring slowly morphing the app from just a doorbell / security tool into a neighborhood surveillance network.  If you have the app, you can see that most of the functionality is now about messaging and notifications shared around the neighborhood, generally dominated by local Karen's putting up panicky posts about someone they saw they thought was creepy.  In the main menu of the app, the very first option after a link to the dashboard is called "neighbors."  This is the neighborhood watch group on steroids.

As a libertarian, what do I have against private neighborhood voluntary surveillance networks?  Nothing, but this is neither voluntary nor private.  As for voluntary, this functionality was added on an opt-out basis with zero notification, at least until this commercial came out.  But what about privacy?

Well, I spent more time in the app yesterday than I probably had cumulatively over 5+ years.  The first thing I did was turn off this advertised feature.  From the main menu (the three bars in the upper left) you need to choose control center (not settings) and then scroll way down to "search party" (that is what they call it, to evoke maybe a bunch of guys with St Bernards looking for a lost hiker) and turn it off.

So while I was in the app I started trying to see if there was a way to block Amazon from sharing all this with the government or other third parties.  There is an intriguing option in the control center labelled public safety which says it controls public safety agency notification settings -- maybe one can block sharing with the government?  Nope.  Turns out this option is just to change what police and other agencies can post to your neighborhood feed.

In the same control center there is a privacy tab.  I clicked on that, but there are no settings.  Only a promise to be really really nice  and make our privacy their highest priority but no specific commitments on data privacy.  Also note the use of "neighbors" over and over.  It is as if they are trying to establish some right to collective privacy (whatever the f*ck that is) instead of individual privacy.

But it does say that I am in complete control so maybe there is a data sharing option somewhere else.  Further down we finally get to the "data management" option.  It says "Request a copy of your data, manage third-part access, or delete your data."  There we go!  Here is the screen you get:

This is the whole screen. Notice anything?  As promised, you can download your personal data, I guess just to see what the CIA is looking at.  You can delete your data, at the cost of bricking your products.  But there is no actual option to manage 3rd party data access.  It is promised in the privacy statement, it is promised in the menu header, but it does not exist.  After an hour on their site and in the app, I still don't know who has access to my doorbell camera image.

**footnote: The other day in Orange County CA I was doing my 4 mile walk through some neighborhoods and I passed 4 young (at least relative to me) women pushing strollers.  When I looked, all 4 strollers had dogs in them, not children.  Some time ago someone said (sorry I can't give credit, can't remember) "dogs are the new children, plants are the new dogs."  I didn't really understand that until recently but I believe it.  I can't remember an airline flight I have been on that had more babies in the cabin than dogs.

Since Richard Nixon weaponized the IRS against his enemies, by mining their tax returns for information he could use against them and calling down onerous audits on them, I thought it was an established principle of liberal democracy in this country that tax returns could not be used politically.  The only people who are supposed to have access to them are people who have legitimate enforcement responsibilities for tax collection.  That means the President and his staff can't rifle through them, and I thought those rules applied to Congress as well.

However, the Democrats in the House of Representatives, who mostly grew up excoriating Nixon's excesses, are now arguing the House should have access to any tax return they wish for any reason.  Of course, this is all playing out vis a vis Donald Trump.  From the WSJ:

The House’s tax-writing committee sued the Treasury Department and the Internal Revenue Service on Tuesday for access to President Trump’s tax returns, hoping federal judges will pry loose records that the administration has refused to hand over.

The lawsuit from the House Ways and Means Committee puts the clash over Mr. Trump’s tax returns and audit records in the courts, exactly where Committee Chairman Richard Neal (D., Mass.) and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchinhave predicted for months that it would land.

Mr. Neal is asking the courts to enforce a subpoena that Mr. Mnuchin and IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig have defied and produce the records immediately. The chairman also wants the courts to validate his authority under a tax code section that says he can get any taxpayer’s returns upon request.

My little town that in the Phoenix area is apparently setting up surveillance cameras all over town, hidden in fake cacti.   This never once was discussed in any public meeting, and residents only found out about it when the cameras starting going up.

Residents were alarmed to see the cactus cameras popping up throughout the town over the last few days with no indication of what they were being used for as city officials refused to explain their purpose until all the cameras were installed.

Town leaders initially declined to even talk to local station Fox 10 about the cameras, with Paradise Valley Police saying they were “not prepared to make a statement at this time.” The network was similarly rebuffed when they attempted to get answers on license plate scanners that were being installed in traffic lights back in February.

Fox 10’s Jill Monier was eventually able to speak to Town Manager Kevin Burke, who admitted that the cameras were being used to “run license plates of cars against a hotlist database.”

When asked why officials had been secretive about the cameras, which are being placed on the perimeter of the town, Burke asserted that there was “nothing to hide” and that the cameras wouldn’t be activated until privacy concerns had been addressed.

“Shouldn’t that have been vetted before they even went up?” asked Monier, to which Burke responded, “It probably is fair.”

This appears to be part of the on-again-pretend-to-be-off-again DHS program to set up nationwide tracking of license plates.  Ugh.  Really gives a creepy Owrellian vibe to our town name of "Paradise Valley".  More good news:

The American Civil Liberties Union subsequently revealed that the cameras were also using facial recognition technology to record who was traveling in the vehicle “as part of an official exercise to build a database on people’s lives,” reported the Guardian.