Amazon’s Ring doorbell videos make America less safe from crime

In October, a man walked down his Florida street to return a neighbor’s package that had been accidentally delivered to his address. But unbeknownst to this good Samaritan, he was being watched by an Amazon Ring doorbell camera on the front porch, reported The Washington Post. Police told The Post that the Ring device sent an alert to the homeowner and his teenage son, who — assuming there was an intruder — grabbed .45-caliber handguns and opened fire on a woman (not the package returner) sitting in her car. 

She wasn’t hurt, but it was a close call. Seven rounds blew through a child’s car seat and lodged themselves in her seatback. If the car seat hadn’t been empty, a child likely would have been killed. 

Surveillance proponents will claim this act of violence had nothing to do with Ring and other networked doorbell cameras. They’ll blame the neighbors, the neighborhood, the guns. But we have to face reality: Blanketing our neighborhoods in surveillance devices that promote a culture of suspicion makes all of us less safe. 

Devices like Ring and the apps associated with them are made to keep us on constant alert. They ping us with notifications, demanding our attention, and offer “infinite scroll” like Facebook and Instagram, but for neighborhood crime. These devices make watching one another constantly feel acceptable, expected and even addicting. They present surveillance as the new normal, and fear along with it.  

The Neighbors App, associated with Amazon Ring, boasted more than 10 million users in 2020. Front doors across the U.S. are smothered in millions of similar devices, like Google Nest and Wyze. And tens of millions of people post videos and images from these cameras to neighborhood watch forums like Citizen App (which literally rebranded itself from “Vigilante”) and NextDoor. A recent report from nonprofit research organization Data & Society found that homeowners are increasingly using Ring and other networked doorbell cameras to surveil and punish delivery drivers, turning doorsteps into humiliating performance reviews for underpaid gig workers. And, this July, we learned that Amazon infringes on our civil liberties by handing over Ring video to the police without notification or warrants.