Maybe you bought a video doorbell to make sure you don’t miss the pizza arriving or to avoid getting out of bed for door-to-door sales reps. What you didn’t bank on was that your home security system might be turned into a tool of the surveillance state. Video doorbells have been in the news a lot lately, from Ring’s creepy Super Bowl ad to the retrieval of Nest doorbell footage in the Nancy Guthrie case, and people are beginning to ask: Where is my video going, who might use it, and for what?
I have expert advice for you on how to protect your privacy and the privacy of other folks in your neighborhood, and what your rights are with regard to video requests from law enforcement. I’ll also highlight the best video doorbells to use and how to set them up in a privacy-conscious way.
Ring Rinse Repeat
We have a complicated relationship with Ring here at WIRED. We stopped testing its doorbells and cameras for our buying guides in 2022, briefly resumed following a policy change, and recently reinstated our ban last year over concerns about the data it collects, how that data is shared, and its partnerships with law enforcement. The company has repeatedly announced deals to make video more accessible to law enforcement and then canceled them after public outcry. But the furore surrounding the Super Bowl ad, which shows a network of Ring cameras across a community using AI to track a lost dog, hit new heights.
Senator Ed Markey urged his fellow Americans to “oppose this creepy surveillance state." Privacy expert Chris Gilliard described the ad as “... a clumsy attempt by Ring to put a cuddly face on a rather dystopian reality: widespread networked surveillance by a company that has cozy relationships with law enforcement …” in a 404 media piece.
Perhaps the funniest response came from a parody video featuring rival company Wyze cofounder Dave Crosby saying, “We could use this technology to find literally anyone, but we only use this technology to find lost dogs.”
It didn’t take long for Ring to announce its Flock partnership was off.
“I would not be ready to declare Ring harmless because the company has called off a potential partnership with Flock Safety,” Dr. Matthew Guariglia, Senior Policy Analyst for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), told WIRED. “People need to realize that all these police devices and data streams are incredibly interoperable. Axon, the maker of a huge percentage of police body-worn cameras and a popular operating system for fusing all police surveillance, is making a tool to let police request Ring footage, so the fight continues, despite some feeble PR maneuvering.”
When I asked Ring founder, Jamie Siminoff, about this in September last year, he was bullish, “There is no access that we're giving police to anything other than the ability to, in a very privacy-centric way, request footage from someone who, by, the way, wants to do this because they want to live in a safe neighborhood.”
What Are the Risks?
... continue reading