I am sure in a memo like this they need to lay out all the practical business reasons why their company should make this move, but ever since this news [1] came out in 2019 I've suspected that Ring had other uses to the then richest man in the world, as a massive private surveillance system.
"Beginning in 2016, according to one source, Ring provided its Ukraine-based research and development team virtually unfettered access to a folder on Amazon’s S3 cloud storage service that contained every video created by every Ring camera around the world."
Now, you can easily imagine that this started as some engineers' innocent attempt to improve their machine learning algorithms. But at the same time, this system was purportedly active at the time of the Amazon acquisition, and while there is no way to prove their motives, this seems to me like a huge perk for someone who is one of the most powerful people in the world.
I’ve followed this story as well, and while I wouldn’t really put anything past Bezos (or any other member of a certain social class, really), I always interpreted this to be a simple Intelligence Community operation through-and-through. Select Amazon employees and Bezos having the (same?) access is the layer on top of the cake that is merely the continuation of PRISM (and all other “tailored” access programs i.e. mass data collection). AWS being awarded the recent DoD contract(s) for cloud service read to me that they were simply formalizing arrangements that had long been in place in the shadows.
> AWS being awarded the recent DoD contract(s) for cloud service read to me that they were simply formalizing arrangements that had long been in place in the shadows.
Sounds spooky!
However, having worked in said environments, it's really not.
Ah yes, then we will take your word for it.
After Snowden there's no reason to trust anyone in the government saying they are not funding a massive spying operation.
It's a fair point (which makes everything worse). It was illegal for the government to do a lot of the surveillance (which didn't exactly stop them) but having a private company do it insulates the intelligence community from backlash. Plus Amazon is needed to handle the actual production, sales, and marketing of the devices.
The government can't direct a company to do surveillance that the government itself couldn't do. If the government were just going to flaunt the law anyways there'd be easier ways to get after the data in these buckets. And none of this would insulate the government from backlash anyways.
Likewise, if you're Bezos and you have unfettered access to PRISM-tier data that AWS employees are just going to say "OK!" for, you don't need to buy Ring. Just grab the data! It's sitting on your S3 buckets!
At most the government might be able to use data that Amazon would willingly turnover for whatever reason, assuming they're not contractually prevented from that, but you can't hardly build a surveillance program around the idea that Amazon might allow you to luck into data you need.
Ring also provides a persistent delivery check to cut down on fraud/theft. Not sure if you’ve seen it, but there’s internet video of a delivery driver setting the package down, taking a picture, and then picking it back up. With Ring, you can now monitor delivery drivers like the warehouse workers.
It takes a lot of energy and coordination to create functioning software. To suggest that this is being used for a private surveillance system for one individual is ridiculous. Engineers are constantly throwing items without much thought into storage buckets. I’d attribute this to ignorance over malice.
"Beginning in 2016, according to one source, Ring provided its Ukraine-based research and development team virtually unfettered access to a folder on Amazon’s S3 cloud storage service that contained every video created by every Ring camera around the world."
Now, you can easily imagine that this started as some engineers' innocent attempt to improve their machine learning algorithms. But at the same time, this system was purportedly active at the time of the Amazon acquisition, and while there is no way to prove their motives, this seems to me like a huge perk for someone who is one of the most powerful people in the world.
[1] https://theintercept.com/2019/01/10/amazon-ring-security-cam...