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Amazon Ring's lost dog ad sparks backlash amid fears of mass surveillance

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Re: Amazon Ring's lost dog ad sparks backlash amid fears of mass surveillance

#101

Post by nektro »

slg wrote: post #29
mjr00 wrote: post #20

The Dark Knight was released in 2008. In that movie, Batman hijacks citizens' cellphones to track down the Joker, and it's presented as a major moral and ethical dilemma as part of the movie's overall themes. The only way Batman remains a "good guy" in the eyes of the audience is by destroying the entire thing once he's done. Crazy to think that less than two decades later, an even more powerful surveillance technolo…

It's hard to not become disillusioned with our industry when most of it is just the manifesting of that Torment Nexus tweet. It's like no one in the tech world actually understands any piece of fiction that they have ever consumed.

its far simpler than that; not caring about what they've built if the check is big enough. because they've taught us that "if i don't build it, they'll just hire someone else. might as well be me that gets the money." but if there was solidarity or more regulation it'd be much less of a guarantee that these things would be built.

Re: Amazon Ring's lost dog ad sparks backlash amid fears of mass surveillance

#102

Post by foobar_______ »

idle_zealot wrote: post #33
blibble wrote: post #17

that advert is just so horribly manipulative it's borderline evil how can normal people go to work and produce this output? (I suppose everyone that is prepared to work at Amazon corporate is... a certain type of person)

It's not really about the individual people. They're probably all pretty normal interpersonally. Our systems reward this behavior, so people do it. Surveillance is desired by the politically and economically powerful, and the contravening forces are weak and largely unorganized. Do we punish politicians or businesses for bad behavior? No? Then they'll engage in whatever behavior advances their interests. You could pu…

I like your take. I see this same thing playing out across many parts of the world.

Dont hate the player hate the game

It is about incentives and rules of the "game" that drive things. Sure, there are a few evil people but the vast majority of it is normal people responding to broken rules/incentives. Probably you and I both fall in this category :)

Re: Amazon Ring's lost dog ad sparks backlash amid fears of mass surveillance

#103

Post by wat10000 »

toephu2 wrote: post #88
text0404 wrote: post #19

Even more concerning is that Ring is partnering with Flock [1], which has been the subject of quite a bit of controversy recently [2][3][4], with the CEO lashing out at critics with inflammatory language [5][6]. [1] https://www.flocksafety.com/blog/flock-safety-and-ring-partn... [2] https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/flock-roundup [3] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/10/ice-school-c... [4] https…

[flagged]

Of course they do some good. You could improve things even further by implementing a system like Judge Dredd, and we'd save a ton of money as well.

This is the problem with limits on law enforcement. There are tradeoffs, and people really don't like tradeoffs. Many people prefer to just assume that law enforcement will use their powers for good, rather than have to think about whether any given change will do more harm than good due to enabling bad law enforcement.

Re: Amazon Ring's lost dog ad sparks backlash amid fears of mass surveillance

#104

Post by rightbyte »

culi wrote: post #68
cyode wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pulled from IMDB, Morgan Freeman as Lucius Fox voices the consternation perfectly: > Batman: [seeing the wall of monitors for the first time at the Applied Sciences division in Wayne Enterprises] Beautiful, isn't it? > Lucius Fox: Beautiful... unethical... dangerous. You've turned every cellphone in Gotham into a microphone. > Batman: And a high-frequency generator-receiver. > Lucius Fox: You took my sonar concept an…

Lmao did they really say it's null-key encrypted? Unfortunately a very realistic depiction of how many of the brands advertising their security the strongest often have the most ridiculously broken security (flock)

I mean it is technobabble but in some way it is also poetic.

Re: Amazon Ring's lost dog ad sparks backlash amid fears of mass surveillance

#105

Post by pbhjpbhj »

gorjusborg wrote: post #77
idle_zealot wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not really about the individual people. They're probably all pretty normal interpersonally. Our systems reward this behavior, so people do it. Surveillance is desired by the politically and economically powerful, and the contravening forces are weak and largely unorganized. Do we punish politicians or businesses for bad behavior? No? Then they'll engage in whatever behavior advances their interests. You could pu…

> It's not really about the individual people. They're probably all pretty normal interpersonally. Our systems reward this behavior, so people do it. Sorry, but people who do things they normally wouldn't because they are rewarded are not good people. They may be 'normal' in a distribution sense, but that doesn't mean the behavior becomes acceptable through it becoming commonplace.

The idea is compelling to consider though - I just saw a clip of comedian Romesh Ranganathan saying that a reason he hasn't cheated on his wife is lack of opportunity; another side of the same idea.

Perhaps we would all be shit-head billionaires if given the opportunity.

Most of us stay within our ethical lane, but then we don't have the money to afford a private island to abuse people on; we don't have to resist the temptation to incite an insurrection, or to shift gold markets by threatening a war ... perhaps we'd be tempted?

Re: Amazon Ring's lost dog ad sparks backlash amid fears of mass surveillance

#106

Post by awkward »

b00ty4breakfast wrote: post #45
mjr00 wrote: post #20

The Dark Knight was released in 2008. In that movie, Batman hijacks citizens' cellphones to track down the Joker, and it's presented as a major moral and ethical dilemma as part of the movie's overall themes. The only way Batman remains a "good guy" in the eyes of the audience is by destroying the entire thing once he's done. Crazy to think that less than two decades later, an even more powerful surveillance technolo…

This is a bit orthogonal to the article, but Christopher Nolan gives me the willies. Almost all his films have this kind authoritarian apologia in them.

To be fair that's more than a little bit present in most superhero media.

Re: Amazon Ring's lost dog ad sparks backlash amid fears of mass surveillance

#107

Post by wat10000 »

pibaker wrote: post #76

There would be less backlash to the Ring ad if the ad was honest about how people actually use it. Show us porch pirates, burglars and stupid neighbor who backs into your car being caught on camera. But instead, they have to come up with something "wholesome" like finding your lost doggo. The wholesomeness is so forced and cringe that it makes you think they have something to hide. It almost feels like the people who…

Isn't the whole point of the ad that they have a new feature and they want people to know about it? They're not making up the idea of finding lost dogs. They have a new feature where you upload a photo of your lost dog and it automatically looks for the dog in camera feeds.

Re: Amazon Ring's lost dog ad sparks backlash amid fears of mass surveillance

#108

Post by isametry »

The Circle (2017) is by no means a perfect movie, based on a 2013 book which I’m told is only marginally better.

But it did do a surprisingly accurate job of depicting pretty much this exact scenario, 9 (13) years in advance.

As in: sleek FAANG holds a grand showcase of mass surveillance using its ubiquitous user-installed smart cameras, under the guise of a good cause.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=Mro9RCAhvE4

(The fictional story is slightly more blunt about it, the good cause being finding wanted persons, rather than lost dogs).

Re: Amazon Ring's lost dog ad sparks backlash amid fears of mass surveillance

#109

Post by whiskey-one »

bayindirh wrote: post #91
mjr00 wrote: post #20

The Dark Knight was released in 2008. In that movie, Batman hijacks citizens' cellphones to track down the Joker, and it's presented as a major moral and ethical dilemma as part of the movie's overall themes. The only way Batman remains a "good guy" in the eyes of the audience is by destroying the entire thing once he's done. Crazy to think that less than two decades later, an even more powerful surveillance technolo…

In the series Person of Interest, there's a scene where you can see racks of servers which allows to track everyone in a city (New York?). When I first saw the scene I said: "This amount of servers is not remotely enough to pull something like this". When I think of the scene now: "These amount of servers can do much more than the scene portrays". I mean, most of the tech presented in the series is almost standard op…

Subsequently in PoI we see two imperfect super-intelligent AIs let loose in the real world fight each other for domination and their objectives.

For me, it’s a question of when, not if this happens in real life.

Re: Amazon Ring's lost dog ad sparks backlash amid fears of mass surveillance

#110

Post by AlexandrB »

steezeburger wrote: post #81
dylan604 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that the same willies as something like 1984 or Black Mirror? All they are doing is taking some idea present now, and just taking it too the darker places of it while society is currently only seeing the rosy side of things. It's stories like this that might be first time someone might actually consider other implications of ideas.

I think they take issue with how it was ultimately okay to do to catch the Joker as long as Batman didn't use it and gave power to Luscious who resigned, instead of just calling it out as terrible and not doing it. That's how I read their comment anyway. "apologia"

There's real media illiteracy in watching a character in a film do a thing and assume that means the filmmaker is endorsing that thing. This has the same vibe as the Hays Code[1] which mandated that the bad guys in film must always get their comeuppance.

> All criminal action had to be punished, and neither the crime nor the criminal could elicit sympathy from the audience, or the audience must at least be aware that such behavior is wrong, usually through "compensating moral value".

Modern cinema and cinematic critique has been so flattened by the constant accusations of filmmakers supporting some "-ism" or another by failing to have their characters directly speak out against it. It's ridiculous.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hays_Code

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