Ep. 50: My Ring Search Party is Over

When our consumer devices become nodes in a mass surveillance network, we have the opportunity to influence privacy rights with how we spend our consumer dollars. In this episode I talk about my personal choice to remove my Ring doorbell camera and replace it with a more privacy preserving option.

Your Data Will Be Use Against You

https://nyupress.org/9781479838288/your-data-will-be-used-against-you/ 

Enable Ring Encryption

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/02/amazon-rings-end-end-encryption-what-it-means?language=sh 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

If you saw Rings Ed during the Super Bowl in the United States, they shared a feature called Search Party that they used to find an adorable lost dog. It didn't take many people long and most of us to imagine other scenarios where you could search for various things other than cute lost puppies that might not be what you wanted as a consumer or owner of a ring. So I'm going to talk a little bit more about that today and some of those details and privacy and surveillance and why I'm now holding my previous ring in my hand as opposed to running it on the doors. So this is the Talk2Me PDD podcast. I'm your host, PDD, talking about all things technology and society, knowledge work, leadership, people management, all that fun stuff. So today is episode 50, where I'm declaring my ring search party being over. So let's get into it a little bit. Now at first, this is, you know, obviously an issue for citizens and laws and policy and regulation. So you might be wondering, okay, you know, how does this apply in the workplace scenario in the world of knowledge work or text? So these are often important considerations around governance with data and privacy, what you're allowed to do with it. To be able to access all of the data that come in from various systems like cameras or other data sources, you need some way to analyze it, whether it's data science or some other type of AI tool. So if you have any sort of responsible AI framework within your organization, these are types of issues that you want to consider how you're going to handle within your own organization. And then I think within society at large, as consumers become more aware of how some of their data is being used, they may choose to exercise their buying power to support companies and products that offer privacy as a feature or other things along those lines. So then this can be something that can allow you to differentiate in a marketplace where that is a feature. And this is something that can come up at all levels in the organization, you know, obviously thinking about it at leadership and design and the responsible AI tier of a company. But certainly, you know, at the engineering level where it actually gets implemented is really important. I was just having a great conversation with an engineer talking about some design decisions and advocating for a particular design choice over another because it it offered more of a privacy preserving feature and user control over data. So whatever level that you're at within an organization, it's important to understand privacy implications, uh, data collection, and all that sort of thing. So yeah, let's get let's get into it. Let's get into the ring a bit. And I think this is really interesting because this is something that is really self-surveillance. So as ring customers, we're choosing to provide this data, and I'll talk a little bit about where that data goes and whether or not that's something you as a consumer want to happen and what some of your uh your options are. Um now there are lots of other data collection and surveillance methodologies that are being deployed that we don't have control over as a consumer, so that's another matter. That's maybe not something that we can directly influence in the same way, but something like this where we're the purchaser and the person deploying this technology, we have absolute control over it. So um, and then you you know, this is comes down to sort of political power, often how some of these systems get used. So in the US and the current administration, uh you could see it being deployed in you know a more right-wing scenario, like enhancing ICE enforcement, for example. But these tools and data and surveillance are power agnostic or position agnostic. You could just as well imagine it, you know, supporting, you know, a more authoritarian version of cancel culture or something like that coming as authoritarianism from the left. So once these systems are in place, um, they're available to whoever is in power for whatever particular ideology or way that they want to use it. Um so it's important to have some more checks and balances in place. That's the way that the US government was designed from the beginning. Um, so it's really evolving that to keep up with things in you know the digital world where the amount of data and the ability to collect it um has grown without sort of the interpretation of those privacy laws being updated to be applied in this environment. Um so how does how does Ring work? So at least with the one that I had, there's no storage on the device, so you have to have your videos stored in the cloud if you want to see anything beyond you know just a live video stream of what's happening there. Um so that can be convenient in a lot of ways. Um, it's accessible from a lot of places. Um you do often, you know, you usually have to pay a bit for it, so um, you know, that's maybe a disadvantage of storing it in the cloud. Um, but then the concern is okay, all of this data is there, who can access it, who can view it. Um, there's a lot of cases where you know Ring has really marketed to police departments that they're a law enforcement-friendly company. So usually police departments just need to ask Ring to get access to this data and to look at it. Um there's usually no need for sort of a due process like getting a warrant or things like that. Um, and you could argue whether that's good or bad, but it's it's sort of the reality of the current situation. And then if there are other government organizations that for whatever reason are not allowed to ask for this information, like ICE, from my understanding, they can just ask a local police department to get the data from Ring and give it to them. So now any home user who's who's deploying um, you know, a camera or doorbell camera, things like that, where you're storing the data in the cloud, you're we've essentially created this self-surveillance network that is able to be accessed by government agencies without really any sort of transparency or consent or control or due process like warrants around that. So um that's definitely not in line with sort of the original intent of the way that our government was founded, principles of privacy and fourth amendment protections and all that sort of thing. So, you know, the the the counter argument might be well, you know, if you don't have anything to hide, you know, why why should you care about this? And we can talk a little bit uh about it. Um, there's another a book that I just read talking about how your data will be used against you. I'll I can share a link to it as well, and talking about a lot of the reasons why privacy is important and why it was important to the the founding fathers of the United States. And even if you're not being uh your data is not being looked at directly, just the awareness that you're being surveilled or that you don't have privacy can have a coercive effect on on free speech. You really can't have free speech without privacy. Um and the original protections were there to protect anti-government sentiment or seditious actions. So there's you know this founding principle that we allow some of these things to happen in private, even if they are against the government. That's how um you know the the founding fathers were able to, you know, revolt against Britain. Um so it's it's a principle that is as old as the founding of the United States. So um you know some of the things that that are missing are this idea of of consent and then also transparency. So um as someone who who has a you know an an active camera, maybe multiple act active cameras, maybe there are certain scenarios where I'd be happy to consent to to give someone access to um that that data that I'm providing. So I mean I lived in the Boston area during the marathon bombings where there was a big manhunt, and absolutely would be happy to to open up my camera feed at that point and and help find finding the the suspects in in that case. Um but without sort of knowing when it's being accessed, having any sort of record about how often these things are being used, um, you're really left in in the dark as a user to sort of the information that you're providing, how is it being used? Um the you know the wiretapping law has a provision that you have to disclose how often it it's used in a year, so at least there's some level of understanding about how often that that's being deployed because that is in an invasion of privacy and something that should be taken seriously. So I think it would be helpful to have something similar here, even if you allow law enforcement agents to access this data in in the way they do today, simply disclosing that even at an aggregate level, I think can be very informative to to citizens and help them understand, you know, is this something that they want to support or not? Um you you could also enforce that there has to be some sort of consent to give access, and you could do that through digital systems. You know, if you want to continue allowing access without a warrant but voluntarily by by owners of these these devices, that's certainly something that that you could do. Um and you could you could make the argument that you know in certain emergency scenarios or if somebody's not there, um, that consent would slow things down too much. Um but I think even if you took that route, still disclosing usage would be um, I think very informative to most users. If you get a you know a report every month or so that this is how many times your camera was was looked at by by someone else or someone from a government agency, it might give you a different perspective on things than than you have without without knowing that and and just wondering. Um now you could also argue that that level of transparency might not be appropriate in some cases if you have a long-going investigation. Maybe you don't want to tell uh somebody that you're investigating for a crime that you're looking at their camera. Um but you know, you can put in some delays or aggregates aggregates or things like that. You can still convey the same same intent. Um now, so what can you do? Like maybe you're a consumer and you don't necessarily want to make video data from your home available to people outside of of you and those who you choose to share it with. So not just government agents, but also um you know company employees who who might access this data. Um, one of the features that you can do is you can choose to encrypt your your video data. So data that's being recorded still can get stored in in the cloud, but if it's encrypted and you have control over that encryption, nobody else can actually view that video um without going through some additional steps. You could they could still probably get a warrant to um compel you to to allow them to access it, but then that's that's fine, that's still going through that that due process. Um, in theory, that's a feature that the ring supports. Um, I can share a link to that. The electronic frontier uh foundation published a good article about how to use that back in October of 2025. That would have been perfectly fine for me, to be honest. I tried enabling it and it just didn't work with my setup, so that was one of the reasons I decided to change things out. Um now that being said, even with encryption, if you're storing videos taken from these these cameras in the cloud, there is still some information that's that's there. You can see the time a video was created, and you can see the size of the file, which you could roughly translate into how long the video is and sort of how long activity was going there. Now that might not seem like a whole lot of information, um, but the way a lot of these surveillance or information gathering systems work is that they are aggregating many data points together. So if you put that on top of, let's say, cell phone location data or GPS data, and we're tracking someone back to a location, and then you saw that a video was created at a particular time where you thought they might be there, putting all of those data points together can give you a more accurate picture. So even with encryption in the cloud, you are still sharing some information. Um now the other option is local storage on device, which is what I've switched to in a camera. So you aren't sharing that data in the cloud anywhere. So in theory, the only way to get it is if you have access to the physical device. And if it's encrypted, you need the encryption key for it. Now, there's all there's always trade-offs here with convenience and security. So the the one I switched to is not a user-managed encryption key, so potentially not as secure, but they then again more convenient. So it just depends what you want. Obviously, the most secure is secrecy, not having any sort of doorbell camera or anything like that, um, or not having it accessible through an application or building your own system, that sort of thing. But that's a trade-off and a lot more cost and maintenance. So convenience versus security, uh, depending on what you want to do. And I think the that's the upside. If there were more regulation or more controls around accessing this data, then it would allow users to bias more towards convenience because they wouldn't have to be as concerned around the protection of their data. Um and obviously there are you know there are positive sides to having this data accessible by by law enforcement and and by government in in some cases. You know, I mentioned that one where you're you're searching for um some suspects and a particularly um dangerous and high importance investigation. Um so it's just a a balance of what we choose to trade off between um privacy and surveillance and how we can enable this in certain situations or potentially crimes that are um particularly egregious um but not at the same time giving away everyone's privacy or or spying on each other. And this is something that you know has uh existed in at least in in the US for a long time, looking at these trade-offs and understanding that in order to gain privacy you may in some cases not be able to solve certain crimes that you would be without privacy. And and that's just a trade-off that we'll have to decide what what we want to do with. Um and then also understanding that it could um uh you know potentially add false incriminations and things like that as well. So balancing out all of these things um with putting sort of AI analysis directly into into video streams, so um certain features that can recognize faces of people in your family. Um you can imagine that combining that technology with access from government agents who might be looking for particular people, um, you could put all those things together. Now, maybe there's a high degree of accuracy with that, and that helps um accurately solve crimes, um, regardless of the privacy implications. But with a lot of these facial recognition systems that have been that are currently in use with law enforcement, um, I think there's uh a fair amount of uh inaccuracy, and that's a pretty dangerous thing to be deploying a system that is supposedly has the authority of law enforcement and digital analysis and sort of backed up by algorithms that doesn't actually work as well as it should. And how do we manage that and not falsely incriminate people with these systems? Um so again, there's there's many different systems that collect data, um, there's data brokers that sell all of this. I think that's why it's technically not mass surveillance from the government perspective, because they're not collecting this data, they're just buying it from data brokers and then aggregating it. Um, and some of that, there's nothing we can directly do about um as with our individual choices. But as consumers, if we choose to value privacy where we spend our money and in the products that we support and opt out of ones that we think have gone too far or do not preserve privacy in the way that we want, companies will listen to that. It's a consumer economy, and then I think that starts a trend that can go beyond just the consumer space as awareness raises, um, that that's something that people value and are knowledgeable about that can influence into regulation and laws and how laws are interpreted. Um so that's kind of my spiel about that. Um I I hope you found it informative. I hope you'll you'll think about sort of the data that you're providing for free, that you're self-surveilling, um, and think about how if that's a choice that you support or not, and then thinking about doing something about it. This certainly isn't the only device that I'm giving away more data than I would like to, so I'm gonna I've got some things in mind. Maybe I'll do some more episodes about it. And I think a lot of this surveillance is enabled, and some of the things that happen with AI or big tech that we might not like, or where you get some backlash from people, is there's this idea that um we're not smart enough to understand some of these things, so we just need to take the the marketing word of what's being told to us, and I think that's been true about um kind of this big surveillance state as well. You know, people sort of, yeah, I know you know, kind of my data's out there and people are collecting it, but what can you do? Um but I don't think people really realize the scale and realize you know the small steps they can take to have influence over it. So um at the end of this, I'll have a couple videos cut in, hopefully, of of me doing the actual swap out. Um, again, it's it's not that hard. It's not this isn't gonna be a tutorial on it. Go watch some full videos if you're if you're thinking about you know changing out a doorbell camera or device yourself. I know a lot of people are hesitant to do this. Certainly, if if you don't feel comfortable, you can hire someone to do it, but this is really is something that I think most people can take on themselves, not gonna be that that big of a deal. And then as you start doing things yourself, even in the physical space like this, but also in the digital space, you start to build a better understanding of how systems work, you become a more informed consumer, um, and then you can advocate for yourself and understand what's happening. So there you go, fun topic. Uh, hope you enjoyed. Uh, plan to do some more things on the you know the privacy and surveillance side. Um, please like and subscribe, like and subscribe, support the channel. Uh happy to keep doing content and all sorts of different things on in the digital world and and knowledge work workplace. Um, so until next time, I'm PDD. Hope you enjoyed, and hope you enjoy the uh the bonus footage at the end. So until next time, thanks. Alright, so an easy way to tell if you ring the bell, and the thing is powered on, you take one of these little devices that test for power. Press it, and then it's pretty close. Put on the live feed, and as you start tripping breakers, and the feed goes off, you don't know where your power's off and then come back and test it. Alright, so we found the power, turned out to be connected to the microwave in my case. See that light this guy out, put it right to the wires, nothing happens. I'm gonna take these two wires off, and connect it to the camera, and turn the power back on.