That ad gave me a visceral shudder of revulsion, not so much for the specific functionality on display as for the timing, which absolutely could not have been accidental. They might as well have just put 'and we're working on automatic alerts for ICE!' in the ad.
Because if you don't do what you are told at work, you may be forced to uproot your family, spouse, kids, and leave the country. You may be forced to abandon your pets and never see them again, forced to send your kids to suddenly school in a different, foreign-to-them language. You may be forced to pay tens of thousands in moving expenses. You may be forced to pay mortgages for a house you are not allowed to live in. All it takes is one unhappy manager at Amazon, or falling it the wrong bucket at stack ranking time.
Or you can do what your manager asks you to do, over-deliver on it year after year, and you won't have to deal with the above. You may be unhappy with what you do at work, but your kids and spouse will live happy lives, and you can keep your pets and house.
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].
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 technology is being advertised at the Super Bowl as a great and wonderful thing and you should totally volunteer to upload your Ring footage so it can be analyzed for tracking down the Jok... I mean illegal imm... I mean lost pets.
The Amazon Knight (2028): Batman hacks Ring cameras to track down the Joker, showing himself to be a rebellious vigilante who's not afraid to break a company's ToS to make justice happen. After the job is done, cut to a montage of Batman telling an Amazon worker about Wayne Enterprises' new villain-detection technology that could be used to upgrade Ring, then screwing in cameras in every room of every building of the city, and then proudly telling the bystanders that they won't have to suffer any more. He's invited to a ceremony where Jeff Bezos thanks him. A swarm of anti-evil Amazon drones takes off, flooding the city streets. The morning sun rises over Gotham City, colors become more saturated, faint shots of executing every criminal in the city can be heard. The civilians run to the streets to cheer it on, finally free from oppression. The screen fades to white, revealing the Ring Camera Pro 3 Batman Edition, complete with a Batman logo on its black outer shell. "Now only $99! (Available for free in partner municipalities)"
I think it’s because in the early 2010’s these companies were doing truly awesome things, at least in my pov. Google search felt like magic and a portal to a web you could only imagine, facebook actually connected you with friends, nothing like amazon ecommerce had existed yet, cloud shit was insanely cool. Hell, my primary motivation in pursuing my degree was to work at google. I recoil in horror thinking about it now.
I think the trust gained there will be hard to break from people, that in my experience, genuinely do not realize what a complete 180 these companies have done. I sometimes wonder and am fearful at what type of thing would need to happen before people en masse realize it.
let's get this stupid social media purity test thing out of the way: blah blah blah, i oppose surveillance.
now that that's over, the phone is definitely more powerful surveillance technology than a ring camera
you can turn off your phone, so uh, it's not as powerful as it seems.
and practically speaking, ring cameras run out of battery all the time. and also, you can cover them.
the stupidest thing about this whole discourse is that, by participating in it in the particular way that you are, you are feeding directly into what Amazon wants, which is for their absolutely dogshit technology to be perceived as something a lot more valuable and powerful than it really is.
If you want to see where the discussion on privacy and tech has gone since, suffer through the recent “film” Mercy. A sane reading of the premise would suggest a profoundly anti-surveillance and AI message, but it’s quite the opposite.
In an way it’s best paired with the Amazon mess War of The Worlds, which is so thematically empty that it ultimately seems to suggest that while you can’t trust the government with your data, Amazon is a great custodian!
My background is aerospace engineering. Specifically, I have managed technical risk on a variety of aircraft fleets including SAR, military tactical aviation, and special missions aircraft. In a nutshell my job was to look at complex systems, identify likely failure modes, and come up with engineering solutions. I'm very good at it. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it turns out that identifying failure modes in complex systems is a highly transferable skill.
When I launched my first startup shortly after COVID I realized that that skillset makes me shitty at raising capital because I tend to only see the faults in my ideas and I end up with a "nobody would pay for this" mindset. But I also tend to easily spot the ways that tech companies' products can (will, do) go sideways. I am a perennial late adopter. I don't own an Alexa or really anything "smart" equivalent because I knew early on that they would become dystopian surveillance devices and/or security risks.
Part of the problem here is that people who love it are affecting people who do not. If you want to put cameras to record inside your home, fine, but this is people recording their neighbors without consent. The sales pitch is finding Fido, but I doubt that is the end game here.
Yeah in a world where if you post a Ring video of someone taking a crowbar to your mailbox which gets a strike in your neighborhood group and the video down for "hate", yeah, as useful as it is, the mass surveillance stuff is pretty alarming.
There’s no need to fear the construction of mass surveillance anymore. It’s already here. We built it one convenience at a time [0]. When I see all my friends with Alexa devices at home, ring cameras, and a million food apps on their phones, it feels like it’s already too late.
The fears of mass surveillance are some of the funniest things I can think of. Do you think a tree grows a leaf and then says I don’t care what you do leaf.
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 wrote this ad and the people who greenlit it knew something was wrong so they have to come up with a cover story. But like a child smiling at you with his biggest smile while anxiously keeping his hands behind his back, it only makes them more suspicious especially in a time when big tech feels more and more like an adversary than a friend.
In China, kids are accustomed to face recognition early.[1] The kids are checking into school via fare gates with face recognition.
Here's an ad for Hikvision surveillance systems showing the whole system.[2]
Hikvision has a whole series of videos presenting their concept of a kindly, gentler Big Brother. This is probably the most amusing.[3]
Amazon's concept is in some ways more powerful. They don't need full coverage. Just sparse, but widespread coverage. Anything that moves around will pass through the view of cameras at some point.
Suspicious behavior can be detected in the back end cloud processing, which improves over time.
Flock has the same concept. Flock coverage is sparse in terms of area, but widespread.
I think the initial plan was to introduce lost-kid/elderly plan, but they thought people will be more willing to accept a pet version (pun indented) first.
Also the implementation is quite strange as well. I can imagine a version where the camera itself compares the recorded footage against a well-known database of lost children, just like the milk cartons.
I think Nancy Guthrie and the release of the doorbell video by scouring Google’s caches has done far, far more to make people want video cameras and cloud storage than any ad.
Amazon marketing broke a fundamental rule about consumer tech: Don't remind users about how much Big Tech knows about you.
Your various devices track everywhere you go, who you communicate with, what you search for, what you buy, what audio you listen to, what videos you watch, what games you play, who your family is, all your pictures and video you take, who comes and goes from your house, when you sleep, your health data, and much more.
And as a fundamental part of Big Tech's business they accumulate, aggregate and analyze all that information in various ways to increase profits. They don't keep this a secret, but wisely they normally don't brag about it to the general public.
Consumers have shown that are totally willing to give up privacy for convenience. Just don't remind them of it.
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[ 0.21 ms ] story [ 83.7 ms ] threadhttps://bsky.app/profile/weratedogs.com/post/3mejrtyvkyc2o
Archive link posted because in some cases (not all, strange enough) there's a paywall ("subscribe to continue reading")
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)
Or you can do what your manager asks you to do, over-deliver on it year after year, and you won't have to deal with the above. You may be unhappy with what you do at work, but your kids and spouse will live happy lives, and you can keep your pets and house.
Sorry, just a dose of reality.
[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://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/12/effs-investigations-ex...
[5] https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/flock-ceo-goes-...
[6] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46903556
Crazy to think that less than two decades later, an even more powerful surveillance technology is being advertised at the Super Bowl as a great and wonderful thing and you should totally volunteer to upload your Ring footage so it can be analyzed for tracking down the Jok... I mean illegal imm... I mean lost pets.
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 operations procedure via mundane equipment now.
Scary.
I think the trust gained there will be hard to break from people, that in my experience, genuinely do not realize what a complete 180 these companies have done. I sometimes wonder and am fearful at what type of thing would need to happen before people en masse realize it.
now that that's over, the phone is definitely more powerful surveillance technology than a ring camera
you can turn off your phone, so uh, it's not as powerful as it seems.
and practically speaking, ring cameras run out of battery all the time. and also, you can cover them.
the stupidest thing about this whole discourse is that, by participating in it in the particular way that you are, you are feeding directly into what Amazon wants, which is for their absolutely dogshit technology to be perceived as something a lot more valuable and powerful than it really is.
In an way it’s best paired with the Amazon mess War of The Worlds, which is so thematically empty that it ultimately seems to suggest that while you can’t trust the government with your data, Amazon is a great custodian!
Anyway, movies aren't, like, the arbiters of truth. Sometimes they just have simplistic themes.
When I launched my first startup shortly after COVID I realized that that skillset makes me shitty at raising capital because I tend to only see the faults in my ideas and I end up with a "nobody would pay for this" mindset. But I also tend to easily spot the ways that tech companies' products can (will, do) go sideways. I am a perennial late adopter. I don't own an Alexa or really anything "smart" equivalent because I knew early on that they would become dystopian surveillance devices and/or security risks.
And I am so off-the-charts tired of being right.
I guarantee the vast majority of people LOVE this new feature.
[0]: https://idiallo.com/blog/we-have-all-we-need-for-mass-survei...
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 wrote this ad and the people who greenlit it knew something was wrong so they have to come up with a cover story. But like a child smiling at you with his biggest smile while anxiously keeping his hands behind his back, it only makes them more suspicious especially in a time when big tech feels more and more like an adversary than a friend.
So they say.
In China, kids are accustomed to face recognition early.[1] The kids are checking into school via fare gates with face recognition. Here's an ad for Hikvision surveillance systems showing the whole system.[2] Hikvision has a whole series of videos presenting their concept of a kindly, gentler Big Brother. This is probably the most amusing.[3]
Amazon's concept is in some ways more powerful. They don't need full coverage. Just sparse, but widespread coverage. Anything that moves around will pass through the view of cameras at some point. Suspicious behavior can be detected in the back end cloud processing, which improves over time.
Flock has the same concept. Flock coverage is sparse in terms of area, but widespread.
"1984" was so last cen.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/shorts/SMKG8aLTJ38
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XnHFJz-u85A
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=otAuH6FDhgw
Also the implementation is quite strange as well. I can imagine a version where the camera itself compares the recorded footage against a well-known database of lost children, just like the milk cartons.
Your various devices track everywhere you go, who you communicate with, what you search for, what you buy, what audio you listen to, what videos you watch, what games you play, who your family is, all your pictures and video you take, who comes and goes from your house, when you sleep, your health data, and much more.
And as a fundamental part of Big Tech's business they accumulate, aggregate and analyze all that information in various ways to increase profits. They don't keep this a secret, but wisely they normally don't brag about it to the general public.
Consumers have shown that are totally willing to give up privacy for convenience. Just don't remind them of it.