> 2. Your neighbor buys a Ring. Now it's you who are being monitored. Amazon will learn details about you and anyone who comes to visit you, and they will profit from it. (Also they will share the details with law enforcement.)
How though? What information could possibly be gleaned from a Ring camera that isn't already available? It's a unidirectional facing camera with limited range pointed at a public area. The amount of information it could possibly collect on passerby is miniscule, and is already information that is readily available via: smartphone tracking, satellite imaging, or literally anyone on the street with eyeballs, including law enforcement. I fail to see how a neighbor having a Ring doorbell meaningfully changes anything for their neighbors.
> anyone who lives near a Ring owner is going to be contributing to Amazon's business
Again, how? I fail to see how a person's Ring is going to generate anything in terms of usable data on their neighbors for Amazon to act on. It seems like jumping to the worst possible conclusion, on par with those who assume every new application of AI is one step closer to Skynet.
Smartphone tracking only works on people who voluntarily carry their smartphones around and enable tracking features. Satellite imaging is an interesting example - the level of detail at present is roughly the same as what you'd see out of a plane window. But if it gets to a level where facial recognition is possible, that would be pretty worrying. And "anyone on the street with eyeballs" (law included) cannot identify people by sight alone, unless they're already aware that they need to look for that specific person.
Amazon, on the other hand, has put a great deal of time and energy into facial recognition software. They will be able to identify virtually everybody that walks by - even if they don't know a person's name at first, Amazon will keep the facial data and build a profile for that person over time as it accrues more data. That data will be correlated with other businesses and facial recognition software, and Amazon/Google/FB will all profit from the data exchange (especially if they can sell it to advertisers and law enforcement). At no point did the person being recorded agree to have his/her information used for this purpose.
Also they can be hacked and used for harassment, too. We already have the tech to prevent this - it's called "closed circuit".
> is already information that is readily available via: smartphone tracking, satellite imaging, or literally anyone on the street with eyeballs, including law enforcement
It's not "readily available". It's distributed across multiple parties that rarely talk with one and another, and each of them is collecting different types of information. In particular, you can't easily turn "literally anyone on the street with eyeballs" into a searchable database of information.
What makes information useful is it being collected, preferably by a single party, in an aggregate that can be searched and can have analysis run on top of it. Ring checks all of these boxes, and is provided by a company that has already proven to not pay particular attention to ethics or customer well-being if more profit can be made this way.
How though? What information could possibly be gleaned from a Ring camera that isn't already available? It's a unidirectional facing camera with limited range pointed at a public area. The amount of information it could possibly collect on passerby is miniscule, and is already information that is readily available via: smartphone tracking, satellite imaging, or literally anyone on the street with eyeballs, including law enforcement. I fail to see how a neighbor having a Ring doorbell meaningfully changes anything for their neighbors.
> anyone who lives near a Ring owner is going to be contributing to Amazon's business
Again, how? I fail to see how a person's Ring is going to generate anything in terms of usable data on their neighbors for Amazon to act on. It seems like jumping to the worst possible conclusion, on par with those who assume every new application of AI is one step closer to Skynet.