The point of Ring is to protect yourself, right? But what if those videos are being watched by Ring employees without you knowing it?
According to an article from the Intercept, some employees at Ring have access to your video feeds. There are a couple different ways this might happen. The first is that high-level executives just have unfettered access, according to the Intercept article. With just your email address, they can pull up your video feed. Even if Ring employees aren’t misusing that feature, it’s a massive security issue that hackers could easily take advantage of.
The other way that your video feed may be watched when you don’t know: According to the Intercept article, Ring employs a whole team of people in Ukraine who watch various feeds and annotate what is being shown. The point is to train Ring’s AI to be able to identify different types of objects so that you don’t get a security alert when a leaf falls in your front yard. But they’re not only doing that for outside feeds, they’re also doing it on feeds INSIDE houses. The source that spoke to the reporter talked about members of the team who joked about seeing “people kissing” or, ya know, other things. Anything that might be in view of your camera.
But wait, there’s more. Ring also applied for a patent for a technology that would use facial recognition to compile a list of “suspicious persons.” We’re into dystopia territory now. I get where they’re going with this, but what about people who have legitimate reasons for lurking around multiple houses, like landscapers or meter readers? If the AI can’t tell that a leaf falling isn’t a person, how is it going to tell if a person is okay to be where they are?
None of this is to say that services like Ring don’t have a good purpose if used correctly. It just means that we need to be paying attention and hold companies accountable when they’re using their technology for purposes other than what we’ve asked them to do.
