is a senior reviewer focused on smart home and connected tech, with over twenty years of experience. She has written previously for Wirecutter, Wired, Dwell, BBC, and US News.
Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.
This week, Ring, an Amazon-owned smart security company, announced Search Party, a new feature to help find lost dogs. When someone posts a picture of a lost dog on Ring’s Neighbors app, they will be able to initiate a Search Party. Ring then uses AI to scan footage from nearby outdoor Ring cameras and doorbells for the lost pet. If it’s detected via someone else’s device, that camera’s owner will receive a notification and can choose to share the video with the pet owner.
I should be able to choose whether my footage is being searched
It’s a great use of AI and has the potential to track down missing pets a lot faster than social media posts or text message chains. This is because it (almost) cuts out the middleman — you. Rather than relying on you to see a message about a missing dog, look at a picture or read through the description of the dog, and then go check your camera feeds to see if it ran by your house, all of that happens in the background.
“Your Ring AI assistant is looking for that dog and is going to tell you, ‘Look, this dog I saw looks like this dog that’s missing,’” Ring’s founder, Jamie Siminoff, told me in an interview at Amazon’s event this week. You can then decide whether to share the video or just notify the owner through the Neighbors app, he explained.
However, it turns out that Search Party is enabled by default. In an email to customers this week, Siminoff wrote that the feature is rolling out to Ring outdoor cameras in November and noted, “You can always turn off Search Party.”
I checked my cameras this morning, and they were all automatically set to enable Search Party. And I’m not alone; Ring users on Reddit have also reported that their cameras have been enabled for Search Party. As Siminoff wrote, I can turn this off, and if I don’t, I will get to review any footage it finds before deciding what to do with it. Ring says no video is shared without the owner’s consent.
Previous Next
1 / 2 Search Party was enabled by default in my Ring app.
... continue reading